Actually, the intent was to preserve the sense of pride and accomplishment by motivating players to play through their purchases instead of hoarding them indefinitely. You think you want a permanent game library, but you don't. Do you guys not have free time? It shouldn't be that hard to finish a game well within its service life anyways.
I bought Farcry 3 Blood Dragon some years ago. I seem to recall I had to install some kind of mod otherwise the game would hang on startup or had long delays because the installed version tried to communicate with some long dead Ubisoft gaming service that they'd shut down the servers for years ago. Funny they were still willing to collect the money for the game that they no longer supported.