Personally, I think the ship already sailed once consoles got the ability to patch games post release.

Now, if you buy a PS4 game for example, two things immediately happen the first time you put in the disc. The entire game is installed on to the hard drive and the PS4 immediately goes online to look for patches.

These patches are not just bug fixes, but often significant performance improvements, re-balancing of in-game content, and even completely new features and game modes.

Its already at the point that what is on the physical disk has no relation to the current state of the game. The PS4 won't even let you use online features if you don't patch the latest version, and honestly most of the time you want the latest version due to all the improvements.

So there's pretty much no way to get a "complete" version of a game if the Playstation Network goes down or Sony decides to stop supporting it. Its not even a matter of DRM; you just lose access to the data full stop.

As much as I love it to be different, I think there's pretty much no good answer. Even pirates will get bored of keeping up to date with all the latest patches. And its in companies interest to release as many patches as possible to make keeping up even more tedious. The digital economy has us by the balls here.

When software becomes dependent on processing performed online, it may be inevitable that that software will be lost to posterity, like Sim City

They actually let you roll back releases. Sadly devs are a bit less likely to update regularly there.

Since the Appocalypse I've realized that any games you "buy" from the Apple App Store are just rentals that last no more than four years after the games initial release.

Let's face it. If you haven't finished Flappy Birds in that time, you're not gonna.

ftp.funet.fi/pub