This really sucks for some people, but the true impact may be overreported and is definitely blown out of proportion by the review bombing. While all this is hugely controversial on reddit, if you look at steam charts, the player count did not take any obvious hit. In fact it follows the natural trend after every content release. So at least on steam the delisting seems to have affected almost no active players. It's very possible that whoever is responsible looked at the data, saw the true player numbers from those 100 countries and decided it was worth taking the L in favour of tightening the online service to make future development easier. Especially since this "requirement" was in there already from the beginning, they just didn't enforce it (likely because they never thought the game would see this much success).