Because that would be good for the consumer. They make more money on digital only, you don’t actually own the product, and you can’t resell it.

It’s a corporation’s wet dream.

The best way to handle it would be to keep the core game files on a physical card that loads into RAM, and download the assets to the local drive.

It’s basically like a tiny virtual machine running locally.

There are distros that will boot off a flashdrive, but the whole OS is loaded in RAM so you don’t read/write from the drive. I know a lot of ESXi installs work the same way.