Things to consider :
Buying WoW. Once the servers go down, unless you find third party servers, the game is useless.
Battlefield series : cmon, these are designed for multi. Servers down/game gone. (although BFBC2 singleplayer is good!)
Look, I am a game whore. I buy games so frequently, and move on VERY FAST. I have atleast 20 games that i bought on steam that I can almost guarantee i'll never play again. I paid good money for some of these! PC gaming is SUCH a bad investment unless you buy all old/on sale software.
This is a really good solution for someone like me. You say that its a waste of money because you dont physically own anything, and it can be taken away from you at any moment.. but who really cares? In theory it sounds like a terrible thing.. but if steam all of the sudden didnt allow me access to those 20 games i referenced earlier, i'd probably never find out.
On top of that, i don't physically have enough harddrive space to download all of my steam games, so if steam closed down i'd lose them as well.
This is just another option for DD.
Unless you're a person that gets a kick out of collecting tons of old games you never have time to play, this sounds good to me.
I do think it'd be nice if they sent you the game you bought on a disc as well (if theyre charging full price). That seems fair.
Also in regards to people complaining about price; Comparing this to XBL or Netflix isn't fair. Theyre offering you a license for a game, the bandwidth to access it, an xbl style service for multiplayer and friends (with WAY more features than XBL/PSN), the computing power to actually run the games, convenient/install-less access, basically unlimited "harddrive space" on their end to have all of your games "installed", and most likely a constantly updated PC. I'm sure after the service picks up they'll have higher end visuals for the users.
I'm optimistic about it. Let's wait until the pricing and performance is known until we start judging it.