alt Hacker NewsI don't think it was ever the case that games which could theoretically be redistributed were unprofitable. It's more that locking everyone into a subscription or renting-as-buying for everything just happens to be more profitable. That's true for just about anything ever in the world, it just so happens that the game, film, and music industries were able to actually pull it off. Other industries suffered from problems of bad public opinion, but the frog is being boiled as we speak, just take a look at the car industry for example.
You need to somehow increase the cost of doing the bad thing, and then the natural equilibrium will return to doing the good thing. It's like whenever anyone raises taxes or proposes regulation, someone out there cries about how millionaires or landlords or whoever will all leave. But that rarely happens, if ever, because it's rare that the regulation actually makes something so unprofitable as to not be worth doing, usually it just makes it somewhat less profitable than doing it the unrestricted way.
The law is how you increase the cost. Every law has a punishment for breaking it.
I don't think it matters even one iota how much more profitable it is to do something explicitly bad for consumers, explicitly to ensure you extract more profit from those consumers. McDonald's can beg to put sawdust in their burgers, and dairy providers can beg to put chalk and other whiteners in their milk, and game devs can beg to retain full ownership of everything they rent out AND be able to change the thing you've rented without notice or recourse.
All of that is profitable. It's also all desperately in need of regulation.