GDPR and pii reasons most likely. It’s a nightmare keeping track of why certain data is on certain accounts. This can vastly simplify the GDPR compliance mechanisms. If your GOG account is merged with your PR account, there is probably significantly more “sensitive” data (CC numbers, addresses, etc) in the GOG account. This probably exempts some data that either cdpr or gog tracks from deletion or retrieval requests.
After reading the rest of your comment, you are reading the wrong thing from it, the physical parts of the amusement park would be the extant binaries you already have. They still run the same as they did before, but without maintenance they will deteriorate and become non-functional or only partially operational. In an online system there are server bits that might not be available to the end user and those pieces also need an operator.
To make a slightly more specific analogy, with a water park we could imagine a separate water treatment facility that would need to be run to keep the water in the water park safe. That treatment facility could also have plans and schematics.
The actual facilities in these cases are not independently valuable in the software case. It’s the plans and schematics (the source code) that has value… but in both cases you only need the facilities and operators/maintenance to allow people to attend the water park/play the game.
Could the game company also give away a physical treatment plants so that an independent organization could buy their own servers and run their own game servers so that they could still play in their own private water parks? Sure.
Should they? Maybe. But it’s specifically the entitlement to the plans/schematics that gets me…
Edit2: Jesus people, please engage with the actual argument… not some strawman argument I didn’t make.
I must be missing something here.
Edit: I do think that abandonware should be opensourced at some point… but I don’t understand this level of entitlement.
Separation of data between accounts makes them fall under different retrieval requirements.
As one account, a request for all of the data from that account contains both chunks. Separation of those accounts separates the need to accommodate requests for data from one on the other.
It can also mean that internally they may have a sufficient mechanism that data that was previously identifying to no longer being identifying (breaking userid to data pairings for example) which is sufficient to “anonymize” the data that it no longer needs to be reported or maintained.