Yes, I think he had no other option. To begin, as others have mentioned, the play would not have technically been a tragedy without the death of Hamlet. More importantly, however, we must consider what Hamlet's life would have been like had he survived.
His father, mother, and lover were dead. Hamlet killed Polonius, Laertes, and Claudius, and his mother was accidentally killed in the process. His own friends betrayed him, with the exception of Horatio. Fortinbras would likely have remained a shadow in the sidelines, waiting to take over.
To add to that list, Hamlet had many unanswered questions about life, love, and death. He had met and spoken with his father's ghost.
Imagine the repercussions all of those events would have on a twenty-something man. Considering Hamlet's fragile emotions, he probably would have ended up killing himself anyway. Looking through "To be or not to be," there is such a fine line between survival and letting go of life. I do believe that Hamlet would have either ended his life or gone mad: possibly both.
Besides those two reasons, a writer had every right to decide who should or should not die in anything he/she writes. Sir Arthur Conon Doyle killed off his Sherlock Holmes character, but the public outcry was so tremendous that he had to create a plot in which the beloved detective secretly survived! While this gave us many more wonderful Holmes stories, it should have been Sir Arthur Conon Doyle's choice, not the public. A character becomes so close to its writer that, often, it becomes akin to reality. When that happens, it is as if the character is writing the story.
At some point when writing any story, you will find that you no longer have control over what you are creating. Characters you planned to live may die, while characters you thought should die might live. It is a fascinating psychological event, and to take that away from a writer is to spoil, in many ways, the pure intent of the story.
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