Hollywood was so adamant about “not downloading a car”.
That was a meme. The original ads were always “you wouldn’t steal a car”. Someone doctored a screenshot from the ad as a joke and now there are a whole bunch of people who think the ads actually said that.
I think there’s always going to be a demand for games running on local hardware, in the same way there’s always demand for high end GPUs/monitors/etc even if it’s only a small proportion of gamers who are actually willing to fork out for it. So I don’t think PC or consoles are going anywhere.
I do think it’s inevitable that Cloud gaming will get bigger and bigger though. In fact I’m sure that over the next decade or so it’ll probably overtake the existing medium in terms of market share. The convenience and low cost of it will be enough to offset the drawbacks for a huge number of users.
That only applies to products though.
Getting a taxi and then running off without paying is still stealing, even though there’s no theft of an actual product involved. There have always been legal ramifications for theft of services, and this is no different.
For the record I’m not shilling for Ubisoft here. They can eat a bag of dicks. I just think the point the meme is making is based on a false premise.