Yeah: it also seems to solve the issue of "people insist on the company stopping people from cheating by using modified clients with extra functionality" withou

Yeah: it also seems to solve the issue of "people insist on the company stopping people from cheating by using modified clients with extra functionality" without turning the world into a DRM-ridden mess, with everyone's computers running random "anti-cheat" agents or slowly moving software into containers. The reality is that a lot of these games are designed more like shared arenas--such as a bowling alley or a skating rink--that you rent to play your game but explicitly don't own or even "tournaments" run by people who (in turn) rented the arena and have hired referees to police the game and make everything "fair", as you are on someone else's property or at someone else's event and so obviously wouldn't have carte blanche rights to modify the arena or control the rules... and so, as you say, game streaming is in some sense more intuitive / correct as it forms a consistent mental model of what is going on with ownership. As much as I would generally prefer to model many of these games like buying a board game--which you then own and can then play as you like with your friends, even if you disagree with the rules as described in the manual or even add/remove/change pieces--that just isn't the experience that these game companies are trying to build with their online matchmaking and the such.