I'm 100% with you: personally, I would happily pay a substantial price for a good quality game, which I could install on whichever computer I want without it messing anything up, and which had a single-player focus. Sadly, hardly anyone makes games like that any more.
It is, unfortunately, the logical conclusion of Internet piracy. The pirates can talk about how a ripped off copy isn't really a lost sale and they wouldn't have paid anyway until they're blue in the face, but the fact is that someone has to pay for the games these people obviously enjoy so much. Given that one-off big purchases of games seem to have at most 5-10% efficiency in terms of people buying legal copies, the people making the games are looking for alternative models where the pirates can't just copy the whole thing, which means something where you take the money interactively or something where you never actually get most of the game data installed locally so you can't copy it. And that means in-app purchases for the little guys and things like DLC and MMOGs for the big players.
And they still throw in increasingly obnoxious DRM for good measure, presumably because the net win from making it more difficult or time-consuming for some people to get a pirate copy outweighs the loss of custom from people like me who would buy a good game without the junk but won't spend that kind of money on software we aren't actually going to own/control.
In short, if you miss paying a fair price for a finished game, blame the pirates, and blame the short-sighted executives at the big game companies who couldn't find a better way to respond to those pirates than screwing their legitimate customers.
There are definitely a lot of the same arguments to be made for SaaS, though I think there are others as well in that case.
For one thing, many relatively small payments is often an easier sell than one big payment, even if the small payments add up to more over the long term and even if the customer is fully aware of this. (Although on reflection, a model that seeks to get many IAPs over an extended period isn't so different in this respect.)
For another thing, customers who are unsure can try the service legitimately without paying "full price" or resorting to piracy. At the other end of the spectrum, while you're potentially making more money from long-term subscribers than you would with a large, one-off payment, those are probably the people who get the most value out of your service so they don't necessarily mind. So you get a certain amount of self-selecting market segmentation without even having to do any work for it.
But sure, the automatic copy-protection without the downsides of intrusive DRM is definitely a huge win for SaaS.
It is, unfortunately, the logical conclusion of Internet piracy. The pirates can talk about how a ripped off copy isn't really a lost sale and they wouldn't have paid anyway until they're blue in the face, but the fact is that someone has to pay for the games these people obviously enjoy so much. Given that one-off big purchases of games seem to have at most 5-10% efficiency in terms of people buying legal copies, the people making the games are looking for alternative models where the pirates can't just copy the whole thing, which means something where you take the money interactively or something where you never actually get most of the game data installed locally so you can't copy it. And that means in-app purchases for the little guys and things like DLC and MMOGs for the big players.
And they still throw in increasingly obnoxious DRM for good measure, presumably because the net win from making it more difficult or time-consuming for some people to get a pirate copy outweighs the loss of custom from people like me who would buy a good game without the junk but won't spend that kind of money on software we aren't actually going to own/control.
In short, if you miss paying a fair price for a finished game, blame the pirates, and blame the short-sighted executives at the big game companies who couldn't find a better way to respond to those pirates than screwing their legitimate customers.