From a historical preservation viewpoint I find this trend extremely disturbing. Along with online requirements this makes it more and more impossible to experience older games the way they used to be. Even for completely single player games, online content distribution platforms tend to only give you the latest version (except for a few games where the developers specifically set up legacy branches), often even refusing to launch an already installed game until available updates are downloaded. If updates were only bugfixes that would not be a problem, but it is not unheard of for post-launch changes to significantly change the core mechanics of games.

This is a significant step down from the old phsical media distribution model where any changes from the initial master were optional.