You touch on it a little here but this is actually unfortunately how most commercial and creative software works now. For years and years the adobe creative suite software was something you bought and kept, now to pursue constant profits you can only rent the software. You used to buy a version of Autodesk Maya, now you can only pay for a yearly subscription, in essence you are forced to pay each year for a new version to keep the software.
Gaming is dangerously close to renting being the norm. There's a pretty decent chance in a few years yearly releases like Call of Duty will have a similar model where you pay $80 a year for access to Call of Duty, instead of being able to just keep your favorite version and continue to play that. So far game's aren't owned but they're also not rented, it's one of those Chinese style perpetual lease situations.