I have games that I have given money to access many years ago, and I can still select them in Steam and install them without paying rent again.

Steam is better value for me over more than a couple of months, and so was eMusic until Sony ruined it.

How about games that require an account in order to play at all? It's not a new concept and has been around for at least 15 years. Additionally, by modern games relying on matchmaking and lobby systems, almost any multiplayer game over the past 5-10 years is unplayable without an internet connection.

I'm not sure I follow.

Is the argument that Steam is worse than Spotify because a subset of games have got built in self destruct, while Spotify only requires ongoing rent to access that 99¢ song?

I think the self destruct is bad, and requiring 3rd party logins for single player games should not be allowed.

The argument is that platforms like Steam encourage developers to implement vendor lock in features. It's something that's more likely to happen with something like software vs standard media like music.

Platforms like Spotify dont need to because its institutionalised. So I'm not sure its a great argument.

The platform itself will remove everything from you unless you keep paying Taylor Swift every month, and the artists you actually listen to probably don't get anything, unless you only listen to top ten charting songs.