Not even just parents though.
It also punishes people who go on vacation for a week, have a power outage, get engrossed by a different game, suffer any kind of longer term medical issue, etc. There are dozens of reasons someone could stop playing for a while.
It’s really a bullying mechanic that forces players to keep playing the game for fear of losing their stuff. People should be coming back because the gameplay is fun, not because of the threat of lost progress.
The mechanic would be much more appropriate if it were tied to actual time signed in to the game. I was looking forward to this game and was already going to wait for more polish anyways, but as long as this mechanic exists in its current state I’m completely turned off of it.
Windows 10 support ends in 2025. Linux is a very real option for the majority of games.
Given the idiocy in this article, I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t occur to them to delete Windows.old from an external software environment. Ultimately, that’s something you want to keep around for a while because it’s what lets you roll back the upgrade if there turns out to out to be problems.