No portability, either, though that’s kinda irrelevant if you’re using a steam deck in the first place.

More importantly, no ownership. Steam, or any other digital media outlet, can just invalidate the licence, change the terms of the license, invalidate the account it’s under, etc.

While physical media has risks of its own, you are as much in control of those risks as you want to be. You only really have to worry about theft and catastrophic damage to the media, as those tend to be beyond complete individual control. With proper care, even discs can last a lifetime at least. Cartridges can last longer in theory.

We haven’t run into it yet problems with it, but what about inheritance? There are people today that inherited games and consoles. That’s not an exaggeration, there were adults around for the first gen consoles that bought them, and have died in the last ten years. Their kids or grandkids now have them.

There’s zero way to prevent inheritance of physical media. But licenses? Once some of the accounts get old enough, I guarantee that there’s going to be a wave of those accounts being shut down for bullshit reasons that are just an excuse to prevent anyone from passing the games down (and I’m as confident that, unless legislation occurs, Google and apple and whatever other companies use digital sales will find a way to ban inheritance of digital media).

I’m not saying I object to the lack of physical media in every case, and a portable unit is a reasonable thing to not add the extra ports to (unlike a larger console, imo). There’s a use case for that. But the attempt to kill physical media sure as hell isn’t a good thing, it’s driven by what benefits the companies, not what’s best for customers.