You don't "own the game" on physical media either...

You own the physical disc/cartridge, that contains the code to run the game. Not the code on the disc/cartridge. If you "owned" the code on a PS3 disc, that would mean it would be legal for you to make copies and distribute to others.

People don't understand what the problem is, so they're complaining about the wrong thing.

What we need, is the rights to the installation media. If a game is going to be removed from a store, consumers should have a period of time where they can get the installation media in a way they can archive.

For games that use a companies servers, that's a different problem. Saying they need to port it to user servers is a big ask, so maybe something like a minimum support life? Like up front on the box (really, storefronts) "servers guaranteed till at least ____". Companies would have an incentive to extend that date, because the further out it is, the more likely for late adapters to pay more.

And if a game does better than expected, there's nothing stopping them from adding more time. If a game has a countdown clock, people can't really act surprised.

But that's the cost of "live service" multiplayer games where people playing the game costs resources for the company, even if that's just keeping servers up for people to play on. If people don't like it, there's games that use peer hosting, but that comes with its own issues.

If enough people just buy peer hosted multiplayer games because those don't have enddates, then we'll start seeing improvements with it. And that's better for all of us, because that's the real solution for the industry.