I understand game developers want to make money but what is the logic here?
If we delete their accounts permanently, they are going to rebuy our games!!
If we delete their accounts permanently, they are going to rebuy our games!!
And because these are mega-corps run as money factories, the product of which is practically incidental. This is what it looks like when you have MBA/Growth specialists steering the ship based on "data". And the big table says "engagement numbers need to be higher". Then this makes perfect sense. What better way to boost all your numbers, incentivise activity, drop some permanently dead accounts (reducing the deonominator making first derivative numbers better), recoup purchases from returning accounts and pivot to the gold mine that is "not your games"/rentierism.
I think the logic here is that they don't want to get a huge fine from CNIL (French data regulator) and possibly other GDPR countries that choose to interpret the requirements in a similar way. There's a reason so many different services are rolling out inactive account deletion policies now.
What is personal about user `mikepavone22` owning FIFA 2019?
Or is this because they demand personal information for your account, such as your date of birth? Because they shouldn't be able to restrict your access to a service based upon them gathering your personal details.
Many people confuse identifiers with personal data. Next time, assume personal data means all columns of the "user" table and everything that can be sensibly joined to them. "Anonymized" means setting all non-synthetic identifiers to NULL. "Pseudonymized" means replacing all non-synthetic identifiers with generated ones. "Sufficiently" means you ask yourself: "Would I be plausibly able to identify rows related to this one person I personally know stuff about?"
But obviously, keeping user accounts to be able to provide them with their games is a given. No data protection agency would be able to convince a court that you should have made the games inaccessible without explicit instruction from the user. It's a textbook example of legitimate interest.
I don't use these game services, but do they really mandate that you provide this?