Nobody is coming into your house to change the bits on your hard drive.
In a famous incident many years ago, Amazon "memory hole'd" a copy of 1984 from people's personal Kindles when they lost the license to sell it.
https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...
It's been a while since I gamed, but auto-update on launch was a thing even a decade ago.
But publishers can restrict your access to the game if you decline the latest update.
They can restrict your access to the server-side infrastructure that they run, yes.
Which is often required for the simple act of starting a game, even if the game runs offline.
Which in turn makes some games unable to run anything (even single-player modes).
In a famous incident many years ago, Amazon "memory hole'd" a copy of 1984 from people's personal Kindles when they lost the license to sell it.
https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...
It's been a while since I gamed, but auto-update on launch was a thing even a decade ago.
But publishers can restrict your access to the game if you decline the latest update.
They can restrict your access to the server-side infrastructure that they run, yes.
Which is often required for the simple act of starting a game, even if the game runs offline.
Which in turn makes some games unable to run anything (even single-player modes).