What do you mean by google knows it is you? Is this about google fingerprinting you and giving you search results that are only for you? Or because you are signed into a google account for YouTube or gmail or something?
I stumbled upon the game Ships at sea recently and it feels pretty close to what you are talking about. The developer misc games has a few other ship simulator games that focus mostly on fishing. They are pretty cool too, but ships at sea really focuses on having more realistic waves and weather conditions.
I haven’t played them a ton but one drawback is progress is pretty slow on these games. A single job can take hours to complete and usually doesn’t pay much, and there is a lot of tedious straight line navigation across the water. Buy if you are content with relaxing and enjoying the ride they are definitely quite charming.
I’m curious why you think “you own this game from our store front in perpetuity” is required to rival the ownership of physical media. If I buy a game from Walmart am I allowed to go back there when my disc was damaged and get a new one? Of course not.
GOG allows you to download and backup the installers of the games themselves, if you back these up well you can use those installers in perpetuity to get your game back on any machine in the future.
The point of this is not to be a direct undoing of Sony’s decision. This about preservation, one of GOG’s big missions. The games listed as having this in the article are old games who already had physical media, and as part of the preservation effort they are trying to preserve the context of the physical media which is a very significant aspect of the game.