@TarbuckTransom Even if it's a century in the future and Steam stopped existing/forced one-install-only DRM into every download, that just means I'd have to be more diligent about maintaining my good backups and not letting the data decay from flash storage disuse. Same as any copy of a game no longer sold/from a dead publisher.

On the other hand.. I physically had a collection of Nintendo 3DS games, files in cartridges, the majority of which I seemingly lost long ago in a house move. I couldn't copy them to backups while I still had them like many of my digital games as I couldn't plug the cartridges into anything else and the contents are all proprietary and encrypted to boot, I can't re-obtain them on having already paid for it once like with steam, that's just that. And many games on CD came loaded with limited-installation or backup-preventing DRM. You don't really own what you can't do what you want to to keep it and keep using it, no matter the delivery method.

@TarbuckTransom I'd just like to say that software being delivered on a physical object is not what solely makes ownership, it's if the software is loaded with DRM or has to authenticate itself with some remote server in order to allow itself to run.

As an example, Kerbal Space Program (1): That's a downloaded game that has no DRM, no live service auth. You can copy out the entire game folder and run any copy from any directory, make a dozen backups of different game versions, modded, unmodded, etc.. And this is not only possible, but had long been openly allowed and encouraged by the game devs, and from what I understand it, it's long a common practice in the KSP community. Of course, you still don't have distribution rights for the game, but as long as it's my copies of the game on my computers, I can do whatever I want with it. Even if I lose it all in a fire and start over, I can just redownload my desired versions from Steam and do it all again, I already paid for the game once.