I worked five years in the game industry, mostly on (guess what!) security and infrastructure for a Very Large F2P game. I was nowhere near game design or any part of the game loop itself, but I did a lot of work on our account system.

> > In practice, it may well be more complicated than that

> No, its not...

You keep assuming that the information you already have is ALL of the relevant information about this issue. You're just a Monday Morning Quarterback, and you have no way to know whether the situation is more complicated than this. So you can't possibly make absolute statements about this... Unless you happen to work at Valve, on something that has given you actual experience with the Steam account system.