Well, yeah, it's due to the internet, really. And it's much more than just games - increasingly things are now a "service" rather than a physical product. Music, books, etc. All are going in the direction of requiring a subscription for a "licence". The internet has increased corporate control of everything.
When VHS first came out a movie would be around $80-90 to buy and after a few times watching it the quality would degrade, that amount of money now is almost a full year of netflix, if you factor in inflation probably more than a year.
Also you save immense amounts of space in your home and you don't have to hunt down a tape in your collection if you want to watch it, you don't even have to get up from your couch.
Everything is becoming a service because it's what people want, it's like paying somebody to do all the work for you and somebody else tells you that you are losing the right to do the work yourself...
Once the "internet of things" is truly established, your car, or even bicycle, will require a permanent internet connection and will stop working if you don't make regular payments. Pacemakers and other medical devices will probably follow! Breast implants will suddenly deflate unless you keep up your subscription payments, and your eye-glasses will suddenly stop focusing.
Yeah, no it won't.
It looks like that because everybody is trying to make as much money as possible before the laws catch up and stops all of this crap.
You will have to pay the internet for your car on a regular basis if you want internet in your car, but everything else is still going to work.
On topic, the internet made it way too easy for people to transfer licenses if they could, it would mean a serious loss of money for the devs, people would buy a brand new game finish it in a day or two and turn around and sell it causing the devs to lose a full price sale, if the second person also finished it quickly enough then devs would lose another full price sale and so on.
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