You used to buy a game and own it. Now, more and more, you rent access to a library and own nothing. Sound familiar? It is the Netflix model, arriving in gaming.
Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation's PS Plus let you pay a monthly fee for a rotating library of games. If you play a lot, it can be genuinely good value. But you do not own any of it. Games come and go from the library, and if you stop paying, your access ends. For the companies, both Microsoft and Sony are public, the appeal is the same as it is for Netflix or Spotify: predictable, recurring revenue, every single month, instead of one big sale and then nothing until the next release.
Translation: Ownership quietly becomes access. That is better for the company, which gets steady income while you keep paying, and a mixed deal for you, since it is cheaper to try lots of games but you build no library and you are renting forever.