Yeah, I'm a about the games themselves rather than the media they are printed on. But to each their own I guess.

PC doesn't have ownership either, though. At least not outside of GoG. 

Xbox has been making fake physical copies of their 1st party games for a decade now. If you have a game that says both Xbox One and Xbox Series on the cover then you have a game disc that only has the Xbox One version on the disc. Indiana Jones, Doom 3, and several other 1st party Xbox games are just 1MB stubs that call home from the internet to download the rest of the game. 

The sucky thing is that Nintendo Online pales in comparison to actual copies running on real hardware. Their Switch Online Emulators are lazy and inaccurrate even by software emulator standards. And the selection is trash compared to what we had on the Wii's Virtual Console. 

Indeed GOG is the only one with actual ownership. 

That said, being on Steam gives you...shall we say...de facto ownership of pretty much everything you bought there, since, aside from official offline backups, whatever happens with the store, you will always be able to, thanks to..."community effort"... find a way around it. While Steam is a platform, there's a way around it, if need ever arises, and that's sort of unwritten guarantee that you won't be left without your games, no matter what happens, which is what digital on consoles does not provide.

As Holodust said there's a way around it though even putting that aside there's a portion of software on Steam that is DRM free. In general though if someone finds a way to directly access the files of the game and backs them up that is a way of getting ownership even if it's not ideal. For physical vs digital the main issue is DRM and consoles are way worse with that due to how locked down they are is what I was meaning there.

Game selection is certainly a step down from Wii Virtual Console. And N64/GC really need to improve their emulation (input lag is terrible for example). The rest? They are pretty good in terms of accuracy. Their GBA emulator for example passes every GBA accuracy check flawlessly, something almost none of the most popular GBA emulators can do. NES and SNES seem to be improved versions of the the NES/SNES Classic Mini ones, which were already pretty good emulators. GB/GBC runs great too.

See, that’s the other thing that isn’t talked about here. Even if online distribution is a thing, Sony still depends on retailers to efficiently distribute their hardware to the consumers. Less retailers selling your product means less channels available and more pressure on the remaining ones. Harder to sell 20M units a year with 5 active channels than with 10.

What an abhorrent decision. This is going to hurt the industry tremendously, especially if the other console manufacturers follow suit (which they will, it's just a matter of when).

With the PC being brought up, got me thinking, this is almost certainly another reason why SNY is dropping PC going forward.
Why buy a PS6 and lock yourself into SNY's ecosystem if it's digital only? You might as well just get a (gaming) PC and use Steam.
SNY wouldn't want that because they'd lose huge amounts of profits off third party software that prior PS4 and PS5 gamers bought on PC instead.
This is even more true as prices keep rising (into the future). You could get a cheaper weaker PC vs PS5 or PS6 and still be able to play most games.
SNY no doubt ran the numbers and realized too many would probably jump to PC, losing them billions, so they're dropping PC and fortifying their walled garden.

*This is probably what SNY really meant when they said they weren't making enough profits from PC. It's not that they haven't been making enough profits so far, it's that in an all digital future with PS6, the money they would lose on lost third party sales would be far higher than the money gained by first party sales on PC.

BTW, there's a couple of things I saw on Twitter that I hadn't previosuly considered:

1. By eliminating physical games and only leaving them available digitally on PS Store, it will increasingly become more difficult to dump and preserve said games.

2. You won't be able to play games not available on your region. Now you can import a physical copy of said game. In an all digital future, this will not be possible.