I'm not against big studios working with smaller ones then eventually acquiring them but MS is literally buying publishing houses and shutting out millions of gamers in the hope they'll jump to xbox which is just a ****** move.
What worries me about the MS game strategy is that it's increasingly more about Game Pass than Xbox. Like Disney, MS want to use their raw buying power to lock popular IPs into a platform where customers have no ownership and have to keep paying month after month for whatever MS allows them to play. Once games no longer have to compete on their individual merits as standalone products, they just become part of the never-ending sludge of
content (italics added for unrestrained contempt).
On the CoD front its been on the decline for the past few years so it's not really a big loss to PS only people as I'm sure someone will jump in to fill the void (unfortunately it'll probably be EA)
CoD hasn't been anything to write home about for a long time, but its ridiculously consistent sales every year still make it a powerhouse IP for anyone raking in a slice of that pie. At a minimum I would expect a new Killzone to be announced this year, but that won't pull in CoD sales numbers. That entrenched beer-belly demographic of casual gamers is going to be nigh on impossible to sway to a different IP. As for EA, I expect that they're high on Microsoft's shopping list.
And here I thought NFTs were going to be the most damaging thing to hit the industry this year.
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