"It feels like sooner or later, big companies will have all the hardware and software hosted on their side and people will only get access to play it according to companies rules."
I agree. The "PC revolution" has gone into full reverse. It's the revenge of the mainframe and the whole mentality behind it.
There's many reasons for this, but the biggest one I think is piracy and the general mentality that "everything should be free" (as in beer). The problem is that nothing is free. Everything costs money. Really polished software costs a lot of money.
So far three strategies for dealing with this misalignment have emerged:
(1) Push everything back to the mainframe and return the user to serfdom.
(2) Create completely jailed devices (iOS, jailed Android deployments) linked to completely closed app stores and use cryptography to effectively achieve #1 without having to offload all computation.
(3) Create "free" products and services for which the user is the product -- this is the surveillance and manipulation business model of sites like Facebook.
I've come to believe that free is actually the enemy of freedom, and that the "pirate party" crowd is worse than wrong. What they're promoting is actively pushing us toward a radically less free world. The "everything should be free" ideology creates a complete decoupling between the user and the economics of software and content creation -- so now the only viable business models are either serfdom or exploitation.
In a sense free places the user in the ultimate position of disempowerment. Since you're not paying there is no reason anyone should care about you or your needs/preferences. It works for content too. In a world where people pay for music, music is made for you. In a world where nobody pays for music, it has to be made for someone else. I envision a future where pretty much all non-hobbyist / starving artist music is made at the behest of advertisers or political propagandists. It's all full of either product placements or messages crafted to get you to vote or think a certain way, and it has negative artistic integrity.