I don’t know or care about the industry. Execs can lick my dick;
Player-side we can expect half a dozen well-known IPs to become Microsoft-platform exclusive. Like locking players from using Wine/Proton and only working on XBox and Windows.
Mind you, talking about it selfishly… It will not affect me. The only game from Blizz I played in the past 15 years is StarCraft 2, and only for the campaign, and I finished that quite a while ago. And on Activision’s side there’s… Crash and Spyro. Kinda cool nostalgia-bait games but I can do without. Plus I doubt we’ll be seeing them again after the remakes from a couple years back.
I actually don’t play many “AAA” games. All the titles I played in the past 2 years, with the exception of the Zeldas and Baldur’s 3 have been either Low-Scale industry releases or straight up Indie projects.