richmondez

Copyright gives them a monopoly over (legitimate) distribution so why spend any more than necessary when people can’t go elsewhere for your content.

That is still better than no physical release at all as its at least transferrable, but yeah,the servers can be pulled and it made unobtainable if your console storage does.

Fairly sure steam has sufficient access to your system to do just that to the games it installed.

Shocked Pikachu?

Sure, but that is as a customer of the content generators, not the streaming services.

Sadly they crunched the numbers and decided they can make more money by charging more while making the service worse for the end user even if they have less users willing to stay on the platform. It’s like they implicitly want people who want a cheaper better service to go pirate, they don’t want you as customers.