They can be taken away from you at any point by locking your account for whatever.

You often cannot run even single player games without having connected to Steam (no need for account to be locked for this, but requires connectivity for one).

Multiplayer games almost always require Steam these days.

I used Steam as an example but applies to other platforms as well.

So yeah, I would say you pay for the license only, and you do not own the games at all, not anymore, and this has been true for a long time now.