[squeaky-clean]

Forcing it on your playerbase is definitely going to upset people, but that doesn't always make it a bad idea. A good enough product can cause an ecosystem like that to actually gain the mass of users it needs to succeed.

Could you imagine if tomorrow, every Minecraft player needed to create a MS account and use some new sort of steam-like MS Games service to launch it? Sure, a few would quit, but not the majority. Overnight you could gain enough users to compete with Steam.

I'm not saying this will happen, or is even likely. Just that it makes sense to me.