I buy physical games on PlayStation and switch/witch 2, because I have only one of each of those systems. But on Xbox, I have systems in multiple rooms. So I buy digital for convenience.

With that said, the reality is that the vast majority of my gaming these days is digital. Probably 90% of my gaming takes place on Xbox, and 75% of that is via game pass.

And over 20 years later

• you don't have to spend a monthly/yearly fee to keep Steam games playable in your library
• you don't have to spend a monthly/yearly fee to play Steam games online
• no Steam game licenses were deleted from your account
• multiplatform games on Steam are cheaper than the console versions in most cases
• they offer consumer-friendly "bundle completion" prices (if you already have some games of the bundle, the bundle price goes down)
• you don't have to pay $10 - $20 to unlock "next gen features" (higher resolution / better textures...) if you want to play your old games on newer hardware
• some upgraded versions are added for free in your Steam library, if you have the old version in your library (f.e. Bioshock 1 + 2 Remastered, Final Fantasy VII, Yakuza Kiwami 1 + 2, Serious Sam 1 + 2, Conan Exiles, Divinity: Original Sins, Little Nightmares, The Sinking City, the Metro games, Skyrim, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games, Doom 1 + 2, Quake 1 + 2, Portal, Half-Life 2, The Witcher 3, Mafia 2 + 3, GTA V, Borderlands...)
• the digital versions have better compatibility to newer operation systems than the physical versions
• you can play tens of thousand Steam games on PC handhelds (and laptops without disc drive) due to their digital nature... disc checks of physical games would be problematic on those devices
• you can play almost any single player game in Steam's offline mode
• you have a consumer-friendly return policy (physical games normally can't be returned, if they are opened)

Thats because pc is not a closed ecosystem, if valve/steam would do the same shit sony been doing and will do people would just massivly pirate their games...

I will say that if somebody has a Fiber Optic internet connection and a Wifi-7 router, game-streaming feels very much like console gaming. I've been using Geforce Now on my Ayn Thor, and it doesn't feel very different from playing games on my Switch 2 or Steam Deck in terms of latency, and the graphics quality is a lot better than on those devices. Even on 5G internet, you can have a decent 1080p experience.

For casual players or cinematic games that aren't as latency dependent, I think it definitely could satisfy many people's needs in countries with decent internet. 

That's probably going to be a bigger threat to actual game ownership than digital ever was. 

(Screenshots taken from my Ayn Thor max settings with path tracing, 1440p DLSS Quality No Frame Gen. I get a solid 60fps no drops on a farm near the PA-WV border using Comcast 2Gbps fiber-optic that my partner was able to get a few weeks ago. Even on his, now, backup T-Mobile Home 5G it isn't too bad. Drops are relatively rare.) 

Nah stuff like consumer rights doesnt matter. Thats just a teeny tiny part of gamers who like that shit. Steam would be fine just like the PS6 will be...

Consoles and PC aren't the same thing. You're not locked into a single ecosystem on PC. That competition incentivizes digital storefronts to do right by their customers, because they could always go elsewhere without having to buy a new device. Also, there was never a huge used games market on PC, namely because the first-sale doctrine never applied to PC software (at least in the U.S.).

Meanwhile, consoles are a walled garden. You buy one, and you're locked into that ecosystem. You buy a PS5 and you can only buy from the PS Store. There's no incentive to do right by customers. They've already sunk hundreds of dollars into the hardware, and to change storefronts they'd have to buy a competing console, only to end up in another walled garden. Also, their digital games are tied to that platform. If you decide to ditch PlayStation entirely and sell off your console, you might recoup some of that cost for the hardware, but if all your games were digital you're never getting that money back. That incentivizes users to stick with their current ecosystem, for better or for worse. A friend of mine argued that's why last generation was the worst generation for Xbox to lose a lot of market share, because with the increase in digital sales more and more people are going to have their purchases attached to an account rather than to a disk that you own and can sell off. Sunk costs are a massive factor on consoles.

Also, there's always been a huge used games market for physical games (estimated value of $7.2 billion in 2025). People have been selling, trading, lending, and gifting their physical games for well over 40 years by this point. A substantial portion of my games library are hand-me-downs (including my Intellivision and all of its games, and more than a few of my NES games) or were purchased from the second-hand market.

TL;DR: The nature of PC gaming easily lent itself to people voluntarily switching to digital without much fuss. The nature of consoles makes it to where a digital-only ecosystem has to be forced, and recent events have made it clear that publishers are willing to take digital purchases on consoles away from people. It is not an apples-to-apples comparison, even if they both involve video games.

P.S.: Some video game companies are also exaggerating the disparity between physical and digital (e.g., including digital-only games, counting GKCs as digital, including PC copies), making physical seem irrelevant when it clearly isn't. While getting exact numbers is difficult, based on what I've pieced together from financial reports the physical market in the 4/25-3/26 fiscal year amounted to at least 200M copies worldwide, 70M of that just on PlayStation and over 110M on Switch 1 & 2 combined. That may be a lot less than the well over 300M from the Gen 5 peak in 2004 across the PS2, GC, & Xbox (shipments were 227M for the PS2, 50M for the GC, and an unknown amount for the Xbox, but it had to be at least as much as the GC), but it's not peanuts, and certainly not total collapse. And that's with other caveats like the number of new games made for retail-release having dwindled significantly from many publishers compared to 20+ years ago as games take longer and longer to develop (as a particularly extreme example, compare five GTA games released from GTA3 in 2001 to GTA5 in 2013, and now we're only getting GTA6 13 years after GTA5).

I have no problem with streaming when it's done like GeForce Now model - you bring your own games from Steam (or from other store), they provide you hardware that will run that game and stream it to you.

Now, if streaming is like some services were, where you buy games in their store and it's locked to their streaming platform, yeah, then bugger off - luckily, those seems to be dead and "rent-a-PC" model is winning.

Yeah, I remember the Stadia desaster.

At least Google refunded all game licenses when they shut Stadia down.

Theoretically yes. The problem is game compatibility.

• the Rockstar Games Social Club ain't supported by GFN, so no GTA games and no RDR games.
• only FIVE GOG games are supported by GFN (of ~12,000 GOG games... so only 0.04 percent)
• only 21 EA App games are supported by GFN (of 188 still purchasable EA games + hundreds of delisted EA games)
• only 114 Ubisoft Connect games are supported by GFN (of 290 still purchasable Ubi games + hundreds of delisted Ubi games)
• only 450 Microsoft Store games are supported by GFN (of over 2000 PC games in the Microsoft store, so less than 20 percent)
• only 551 EGS games are supported by GFN (of over 6000 games in the Epic Games Store, so less than 10 percent)
• 5687 Steam games are supported by GFN (of over 120,000 Steam games, so less than 5 percent)
• no PCVR games are supported by GFN (of over 6,000 SteamVR games)

Yeah, there's lot to be improved when it comes to games supported - the whole idea that there isn't "Install what you want" tier is bit baffling.