I do not think it “had” to change. But some game companies did change anyway. So to rephrase your question… why did those companies change?
A cynical answer might be: “because they could.”
Once technology allowed game companies to license games in that way, let them revoke licensing in future, require “always online” to play, etc… many companies switched their model.
They have incentives to do so. It gives them more control over their product. It lets them force updates, and implement more effective anti-cheat measures.
It also lets them brick old games when they have moved on to sell a new game. If you remove players’ ability to play the old game, then people who want to play your games might buy the new one.
It’s also yours, if you buy their product.
If I write a novel and sell you a copy, you now own all the words in that novel. I assembled those words to tell a story, and you own all the words now. You don’t own the rights to the story, but you do own that specific copy of the words. Also, if you want to you can carefully dissect my novel and learn all the words I used, and the style I wrote them in. And you can try to copy my style and write your own similar (competing) novel if you want to.
I am not sure how much changes if you write code, assemble the code into an application, and then sell the application. They seem analogous to me.
I think in the old days of computing, it was pretty common for people to buy products and then take them apart to try to understand how they worked in order to make another (often competing) product. They did this for both hardware and software.
I think these days companies invest a lot in trying to prevent this behavior. I’m not convinced that’s a good thing. Seems to me it is a situation of spending creative resources being adversarial, and is probably worse overall in terms of advancing the field as a whole.
I also think something is especially fucked up about the world when big companies can blatantly steal (m? b?)illions of dollars worth of data with zero consequences in order to create LLMs and make huge amounts of money from investors… and at the same time, big companies do not want you to even have access to the data inside a product you actually bought.
That doesn’t seem right to me. I have sympathy with the idea that we ought to avoid forcing companies to do stuff when possible, but there’s a big mismatch going on in tech right now. I think that pisses people off, understandably.
