I think this is good. We don't need more e-waste for disks that get used for a year and thrown away. The games can live on a tiny hard disk that takes a fraction of the resources to produce.

Not really. If the services that grant you access to your own hard disk ever go under, you lose it. You do not have access to the files. You're effectively paying for a licence to play the game for a finite amount of time, for the same (if not higher) price that physical media used to cost.