My main concern is getting games in a form that I can store locally for 20 years and then reasonably expect to boot up and play. A secondary concern (ever since I moved permanently to another country) is going digital whenever possible because shipping stuff long distances is expensive. I had hundreds of physical books that it pained me to give away, but it simply wasn't economical to move them to my new home. I kept my physical games, CDs, and DVDs, because they're mostly thin discs and air-filled plastic cases (often replaceable once paper inserts have been removed) and I was able to bring them over affordably.

Over the last few years I'd say I've slowed down on physical retro collecting and only bought a couple dozen retro console games. More often I sail the high seas looking for them because morally there's no sane argument decades after release that paying $50-100 to a private collector or dealer today has any impact on the developer's or publisher's profits in terms of secondary or tertiary sales. The physical game media and packaging have ceased to be games and have become artifacts, almost independent of their content, like other vintage or antique items. Of course that doesn't apply if the game has been rereleased in more or less its original form, in which case I either buy it (if the price is reasonable) or don't play it at all (if the price is unreasonable). I actually have such a game in digital storage that I've been meaning to play for years, and I learned that it's quite recently been put up in GOG, so now I'm morally obligated to buy it if I still want to play it, heh. Luckily for me the price seems fair.

And speaking of GOG, the majority of my recent game purchases have been split pretty evenly between GOG and itch.io; about 95%. I basically haven't bought anything directly from Steam for more than a decade. I understand that many games there are actually DRM-free, but I'm not interested in trying to research every game before I make a purchase. If each game's store page indicated its true DRM status clearly (not just "third-party DRM"), I'd consider buying through Steam again. As it is, whenever I learn about an interesting game that's on Steam, I try to find it on itch.io or GOG, and if I can't, I generally don't buy it; I'll buy it on Steam only if it looks really interesting and it's dirt cheap.

Whenever I look at ~~buying~~ "leasing with no fixed term" anything with DRM, I assume that it will be taken away from me or otherwise rendered unusable unexpectedly at some point in the future through no fault of my own. It's already happened to me a couple of times, and once bitten, twice shy. I know that everyone loves Gabe Newell, and he seems like a genuinely good guy, and he's said that if Steam ever closed its doors that they'd unlock everything. However the simple fact is that in the majority of situations where that might happen, the call wouldn't be up to Gaben, even for games published by Valve.

So yeah, I may put up with DRM in a completely offline context, but in any situation where my access terms can be changed remotely and unilaterally with a forced update, server shutdown, or removal, that's a hard pass from me.