I'm a AAA gamedev, and Michaelsoft Bing may have been my Corporate Overlord at one point or another in my career. Here's what's actually going to happen to the gaming industry after this merger.
As soon as this deal closes, an executive at MicroActiBlizzKing is going to realize that they need to make a return on this $69,000,000,000 """investment""" somehow, preferably rather quickly. The first thing they will do is try to cut costs by canceling every game in production that isn't Fortnite 2 or CODBLOPS VII. Anything that isn't a Live Service AAAA monstrosity that is """guaranteed""" to make its money back is going to be quietly put out back and shot. Next, they're going to stop greenlighting any project that isn't also a Live Service AAAA monstrosity, no matter how poorly that fits. (Remember how well that went for Marvel's Avengers.) These executives have never cared for the Art of making games, but they're now incentivized to make the Xbox 360 era of gaming, where everything was somehow a Brown Shooter with Bloom and Motion Blur, look like the Golden Age of Creativity.
So that's just what's happening at Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard-King, right. But in practical terms, the AAA gaming industry is going from a Big Five in publishers (Microsoft, ABK, EA, Ubisoft, Square Enix) to a Big Four. It's consolidating so much power over what games will be allowed to exist in the hands of an ever-shrinking pool of hand-wringing executives.
Again, just to give a practical example of how bad this is: Ubisoft's former Chief Creative Officer Serge Hascoët was the main executive blocking Assassin's Creed: Odyssey from focusing solely on a female protagonist. It's been widely reported that he didn't believe female protagonists would sell games. This delightful specimen has since been indicted on sexual harassment charges.
Every shipped game is a tiny miracle. But if the fate of these miracles is in the hands of these executives while also supposed to make back their money tenfold, then we have a problem on our hands.
