Humble adding expiration dates without notice

I don't see the difference between buying the game and buying a license to play it. I should still own that license forever because I didn't pay to rent the license for a certain time period. I should also be able to resell that license to someone else when I am done with it just like I can resell anything else. I should own that license and it is mine to do what I want with it. Just like a public library can buy licenses for digital things and then let people borrow them the same way they do with physical things. They operate under the same laws we do.

The only reason this is being allowed to happen is because it has not happened on a wide scale yet. Once something major happens and a lot of consumers lose a lot of things they paid for, something will change. Either laws will be put into place to protect consumers rights to own digital items or nobody will trust the system anymore and a very large number of people will resort to obtaining what they want in an illegal way where they don't need to worry about losing it. If Steam failed and I lost all my games, I would most likely never pay for a digital item again from anywhere and I suspect a lot of people would feel the same and go the same route. If consumers don't have confidence in the system, the system will fail.

I have read it and I have to say I'm somewhat nonplussed but not surprised that that kind of reasoning is trying to wiggle its way through to the mainstream. This is something I suspect alot of publishers in the gaming world (particularly the massive conglomerate ones) would very much like to gain traction. And I fear that without alot of pushback they could possibly get what they want one day, certainly GTA 6 is probably one of the few games whose publisher could even float the idea and possibly get away with it.

I'm not indifferent to the plight of many smaller devs who put their sweat and tears and often life savings into making a game and ultimately not be as rewarded as the latest cookie cutter entry in insert-game-franchise-with-massive-budget here. And I can't deny that personally there have been a few games for me that I've gotten much more entertainment than the amount I paid and some where I didn't pay enough.
(Please forgive me ghosts of Irrational Games/Looking Glass for not buying System Shock 2 till it ended up in the bargain bin 9 months after its release 😭, if I'd known how much I'd have loved it I would have probably bought it full price)
That said there have also been some stinker games/books/movies that at the end left me feeling that the exchange of payment for those entertainment pieces should have probably gone in my direction...
But it's not really how it works and I feel it would only be a surefire way to decimate the gaming market even more in terms of quality or original releases. I feel mobile gaming has a big part in this latest subtle push, along with the increasing (and ever more transparent) greed of microtransactions in gaming in general. When you see the money that changes hands in those games, even excluding the cashed up whales, often to the tune of tens of millions or more, well its no surprise that the often exceedingly well paid publisher execs eyes light up with greed.

Though I can't help but feel that in this case, while I said GTA could be the only game to get away with it right now, the fact that Rockstar and Take Two have made an absolute fortune from GTA games and continue to make substantial amounts of money from GTA Online, it kind makes them an inefficient messenger for this kind of idea; they aren't exactly short a quid.

Edited for typo.

You raise important considerations and qualifications about he examples I posited (despite venturing just a bit towards straw clutching territory 🤔) bit I still feel the underlying point remains the same. That for completely arbitrary reasons people could be denied the product that they paid for.
Don't read a book, fine, let it be a monument to all the books you've never read. Don't like rice, fine, let the box be a nice seat for your cat. Don't want to immediately redeem a game key purchase, instead choosing to print it out, frame it and hang it in your bathroom, that's all good. (Well maybe not the last part...)
But to deny even the most basic access to non-temporally bound purchases of any variety because of an arbitrary and non-debatable imposition of an expiry date just pushes the boat too far out for me. Even more so when you consider the nature of digital purchases like game keys, which unless they're revoked by devs can just in theory continue to exist in the digital ether forever.
(At least I hope, I've got some shrink-wrapped unopened games I've picked up at book fairs in long term storage till I get a proper PC; a few years old maybe but unadulterated and as-new. I admit I've had cause to wonder if they'll still work when I eventually install them 😬)
Such a policy wouldn't be accepted by most consumers in the real world but seems acceptable practice for digital purchases. I agree with you about having a non tethered game copy, it's why I prefer GOG as a storefront. I've also got half a 6TB drive full of GOG installers and ISOs of a lot of my retail games (which in my country I'm entitled to make for backup/archival purposes).

I don't think alot of people realise the caveats to digital ownership, especially on a platform like Steam. Not only don't you truly own your copy of the game/license, you only get to enjoy it as long as Steam exists and only as long a developer decides to let you play it and (in something which I've always felt should be something more controversial and worthy of regulation IMO) only as long as Valve/Steam as a company/platform allows you to use it.
(I doubt most would argue against the idea that many who get their Steam accounts closed are up to no good but does it give a company like Valve the right to deny them access to their legitimate purchases that they've made over the years? Say if you got banned from a book shop for some reason; does it give them the right to come to your home and take away or deny you access to all the books you ever purchased from them?)
And now you've got a storefront (with developer support presumably) telling paying consumers you'll use the product according to our timetable not yours. It just feels like an unnecessarily anti-consumer step, regardless of how few people it might impact.
Apologies for the long rant reply, it's just the more I think about this the more it irks me; unless these companies start paying me I am getting tired of being subtly but continually boxed in with their policies when I'm the one forking over money to them.

Edited for tidiness & typo.