The reason is that Sony wants more data. There’s no technical reason for it, as the game has already worked fine without it for months. This is just Sony clamping down on a promise they quietly made and that most people forgot about.

As for the extra hoops, if you’re still wanting to play the game and don’t already have a PSN account, you’ll need to make a free one and link it. It shouldn’t require any additional logins after the initial link, so after the initial account setup there shouldn’t be any additional change to the process of logging in and playing.

The reason is that sony is the publisher for the game

I read that Sony is doing it for security reasons for safety/grieving and that the game did originally require a PSN login at launch, but stopped it at launch. But I am guessing this is just them saying hey we have this many people using PSN accounts. No other reason to have Steam prompt for login for anything besides the Steam account

but it’s not a game dev. It’s the publisher wanting to boost active user numbers for shareholder purposes, Arrowhead doesn’t gain anything from this happening.