Agreed. The issue isn’t physical discs or cartridges or whatever… it’s how games work now at a fundamental level…

Here’s my solution proposal :

1. Make it illegal for a company owning an IP to do any action that hampers product functionality of any kind, even if “ceasing” action causes a hamper to that functionality.

The only CAVEAT that should be allowed is a game having a MODE that the company supports in which they provide an “official” e-sports competition circuit server you can connect to if you want to compete in an official capacity.

They should be able to sell you the game, and if it is centered around multi-player gameplay, it should work at a basic level with open community-hosted networked gaming support.

2. Any company that owns a game should be required to submit a source code version of it to the government to act as a “patent” to the game’s source code and copyright. No submission? No valid piracy case can be pursued.

Owner company goes out of business?

Company loses game patent / copyright and the game’s source becomes publicly freely available.

New company buys the IP and fails to support all functionality originally in the game from the original owner company?

Game code is publicly released and you lose the ability to pursue piracy cases.

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If you don’t do something this comprehensive, the real problem is - what if a company goes out of business or sells to some other entity?

Corporations do this already in many industries in order to shirk responsibilities to repair issues or do recalls of broken products.

They do it with digital movies, they do it with John Deere hardware, they’ll do it with anything they are not fully required to do that they can weasel out of… so make the barrier to entry to even have ACCESS to the consumer market such that even doing nothing means the company risks losing ownership and enforceable copyright.

Since PS4/XB1, games have basically required Internet to play.

That's not true, at least not for all games. Have a look at: https://www.doesitplay.org/list

The other important thing to me is that anyone who's actually okay with digital-only doesn't care about the disc thing. This generation, many people bought consoles that can't insert a disc (I'll admit, I own an Xbox Series S). That's a LOT of customers.

All of them want to believe they'll have access to their games 5 or 10 years later. So, it's important for the societal response to aim to protect them too.

Selling or moving a game to another account should also be possible digitally and this could be extended to cover PCs, leading to more consumer freedom for everyone.