Back when I used OnLive regularly, I thought more companies would push toward cloud gaming more immediately as a means of preventing piracy. I'm surprised it's taken this long, though I honestly wouldn't be too concerned yet, as most of the success in cloud gaming has been in the form of cloud gaming as a supplement to games libraries you already "own" in some form. Stadia's basically using the same business model as OnLive (minus the deep discounts of OnLive), and look how that's going for Google. It'll never catch on in that form, because the value proposition really isn't anywhere close to what the company thinks it is.
Anyway, as far as digital vs. physical goes, I tend to notice much more passive-aggressiveness from the physical-only crowd, and I think the arguments for physical are flimsier.
Ironically, as much as I prefer digital, I've become more more interested in physical media for movies. I have yet to find a means of consuming movies that I like, though Emby does a decent job for what I use it for. Basically, when I "watch" movies, I typically just like to have them on as background noise. Emby at least allows me to shuffle a bunch of movies in the background without forcing me to install a bunch of plug-ins to automate basic tasks that any media player should automatically perform (*cough*Kodi*cough*), though there's still far too much manual effort required in setting everything up, and it's probably the least stable of the various media center PC solutions I've tried.
Services like Amazon Video, Hulu and Netflix all have serious shortcomings that I dislike, and the manner in which they serve up content only makes me feel as though I'm consuming media altogether incorrectly. I don't understand why movies auto-play as you're viewing the description of a movie or just happen to rest your selection on it momentarily. Why can't you set up playlists or shuffle content for long periods of time in the background? (I understand that it's due to the company's efforts to minimize bandwidth, but it ruins the experience for me.) Why are the recommendations for other content so bad? (I've noticed that Amazon Video now starts another movie when the one you're finished watching your current one, but it's weird, because I'll be watching some 80s action movie from my video librarly, only for Amazon to start auto-playing some anime I don't own afterward.) Plus, given the file size of movies, I think physical media is far more warranted for movies, as we're not dealing with movies getting patched just yet (assuming that Cats doesn't become the norm, anyway). I don't care if a game is 100+ GB, because I spend tons of time with them. Meanwhile, a movie on Blu-ray that it takes maybe two hours to watch is sometimes 30 GB or so. I have unlimited bandwidth, and I know streaming versions don't weigh in nearly as heavily as Blu-ray versions of movies if you're dealing with the same resolution, but it just seems wasteful to me.
That said, why doesn't physical media make it more convenient to consume your content? I understand the push toward streaming, but companies still make Blu-rays, so it's clear they want you to buy them in some form. Why should I have to purchase an expensive disc changer if I want to consume content in the background without switching discs every two hours? Why doesn't the media itself facilitate purchasing a lot of it and being able to consume it as conveniently as possible in its actual form without paying an arm and a leg for the added privilege? Hell, just earlier today, I was brainstorming a UMD-like format that'd slot into an inexpensive tray that could effectively be daisy-chained together with other such trays as a stand-in for a disc changer without the complexity of having to move the discs around. I spend way too much time thinking about all of this. Neither digital or physical is perfect, but I think digital works more sensibly for just about anything but movies.
