Removing Accounts in the Free-to-Play Model

In todays time of massive hard disk space I don’t get how as a Free to Play publisher you set an inactivity limit to accounts and delete them upon hitting it.

id Software does that in Quake Live. After my last mail landed in a spam filter my account was finally removed. I may have played again, but now that my account has been removed, I very probably will not. I’m not sure what their thought behind this is. Getting people to log in and play again so the account does not expire? On me it worked twice in the past.

Or maybe getting people who don’t pay out? Well, that worked as well in the end. But they also lost an occasional (/rare) player and any chance of him converting to a customer.