Microsoft explored buying Sega, Bungie, Niantic, and IO Interactive, wanted to "spend Sony out of business" | Zynga and Supergiant Games were also targets

Embrace, extend, and extinguish. Classic microsoft. I do believe their first shot at what they are going to attempt now was Games For Windows Live, trying to centralize their position with PC and XBox when it comes to gaming.

Of course, that was a horribly executed mess and when it turned out nobody wanted to engage with that stuff, now it will most likely end up being "Microsoft Store with Microsoft account required" affair. For now they are going to play nice and show how fine they will play with Steam and Epic and how they will not make everything exclusive to MS Store and Xbox...

Until they buy out the major players because this time it seems they've decided to throw serious money at the problem. The fact that that for a good while the only country opposing Activisions acquisition by Microsoft was UK is a damn disgrace. It's not about "just call of Duty", quite frankly I did not play an Activision game in 6 years or so, but microsoft gaming market dominance won't be good for anybody.

(Especially me playing everything on linux with proton)