Bioware and CD Projekt worked together on the first Witcher, because that game ran on Bioware's engine. The new director for Phantom Liberty and Cyberpunk's sequel came from Bioware, and he said in an interview that that past relationship is why they reached out to him for the position, insinuating it's not the first time it's happened and that the two companies had continued to be in contact over the years. Given CD Projekt's last two games' similarities to Bethesda's formula, it wouldn't surprise me if there was overlap with the developers of those studios as well; and the same extends to Larian and the inspirations they've clearly taken from old Bioware.
as far as I know Troika just disappeared along with it’s developers
It's possible that all but about 5 developers from Troika left the industry after the company folded, but I'd call that the least likely scenario. In my own career (only briefly in games), people who liked working with me have reached out to hire me from previous working relationships between companies, and you tend to see a lot of the same people from job to job as a result.
The big players don't bother innovating anymore, which is why they don't see any other option except to sell to someone bigger than them. Meanwhile, publishers that used to be small are getting much larger by offering the breadth of games that the biggest publishers haven't for 20 years. To think that things can only get worse is to ignore what's happening right in front of us.
Didn't Troika and Black Isle essentially lead to the creation of Obsidian and InXile? You're basically listing the same studios multiple times. Plus there has been a lot of communication between Bioware and CD Projekt, leading to talent moving between those studios, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same is true for Larian.
Nether Realm Studios, Naughty Dog, Angel Studios (Rockstar San Diego), and Relic, without thinking about it too long, but there are also all kinds of reasons why a studio's quality would struggle to hold up over long periods of time regardless of being purchased, and even then it can be very subjective.
After Baldur's Gate 3, contrasted against what EA's Bioware has output lately, I'll bet Microsoft is happy to let their RPG studios continue doing what made them a success in the first place.
Trusts would be a very extreme case of consolidation, and if Microsoft were to qualify (they're close), it's certainly not because of its presence in video games.
I don't think I'm being charitable at all when I say these old games are dormant IPs. Star Wars Episode 3 was only a handful of years old when Disney bought Lucasfilm, and they were still making all sorts of merch and other products. Actually dormant IPs would be things like Metal Arms and Tenchu. They're not powerhouse franchises, but they're fodder for porting to modern platforms and bolstering Game Pass. Activision is reluctant to revive any of this stuff because it's money that could be spent on Call of Duty.
As to your last paragraph, it was inevitable, but we've been slowly trending toward getting that diversity back in the industry. It may not hit your town specifically, but the Devolvers, Paradoxes, TinyBuilds, Embracers, and Anna Purnas of the world are finding success catering to the customers the mammoth AAA companies abandoned.
Layoffs have already hit this and other industries, including Microsoft, regardless of buyouts, and since this deal is fresh, it will likely happen again in the near future. But there's no need for them to squeeze value out of what they bought. They can revive dormant IPs just by making sure they run on modern platforms and putting them on Game Pass. That alone is a tremendous amount of value that Activision couldn't get regardless of how much they squeezed.
And a lot of people who leave or are let go in these situations go on to form new studios. If you think about it too, it doesn't make much sense that the jobs would disappear. The industry will support a certain number of games being produced, and someone's got to make them still.
A worse outcome to me still seems to me to be a world where Sony is uncontested in its console space.
As for RTS, keep an eye out for Tempest Rising, a Command and Conquer spiritual successor, that's even headed to consoles. With Microsoft successfully bringing Age of Empires to console, I don't think there's any need to promote PC as the place where RTSes live.
Personally, I think if RTSes are to ever be mainstream again, they're going to have to reinvent themselves, but in the meantime, RTSes doing what they've always done will make peace with the size of the market that exists for them these days.
I get the sense that people still won't take kindly to exclusives that they publish, which we'll see when Alan Wake 2 comes out. For me, they still don't answer the question of why I should shop with them instead of Steam if the same game is on both stores. There are answers to that question, but they think the problem is that we need to get all of our games on the same launcher.
I mean...they're removing it from sale because they have a more egregious business model to sell you instead that no one wants. And that last qualifier you added about alternative channels being illegal is the problem, because we have no measures to preserve things like this.
When in doubt, check the tooltips to see what a thing means and what it does. Even the tooltips have tooltips sometimes. I do really wish they broke down the to-hit percentages underneath the cursor in combat, because that would go a long way toward helping the player understand the underlying math.
I thought I'd have put the game down by now, but I'm still playing Baldur's Gate 3. I'm now deep into Act 2 on my second playthrough with the Ghost Recon team. Currently everyone (Astarion, Lae'zel, one hireling, and myself) are level 5 fighter battle masters/level 3 rogue assassins. Since just hitting level 5 fighter, everyone now has access to an Extra Attack, and you can combine that with Sneak Attack, Action Surge, Trip Attack, and Precise Attack to wipe out entire encounters in one or two turns. So far, the only difficulties with this team came at the end of Act 1 (since I was low level in two classes instead of high level in one of them) and at a particular Act 2 quest where you have to defend a portal against dozens of enemies (I just didn't have enough crowd control for that many enemies, so I broke out Gale for that fight). Other than that, I'm basically only swapping out my hireling for character-related quests, like the one I'm doing right now for Shadowheart. At level 12, I should be level 6 fighter/level 6 rogue with everyone in the squad, and we'll storm through Baldur's Gate.
Other than that, I started playing some fighting games again, and I'm not as rusty as I thought. The usual suspects of Skullgirls, Guilty Gear Strive, and Street Fighter 6. I'd probably be playing more Mortal Kombat 1 if not for performance issues and the inability to decline matches against wi-fi players; it's a shame, because the game is otherwise pretty great.
I haven't made much progress in the System Shock remake, but I am really enjoying it. I discovered the Resident Evil remake pretty late, and it's a shame how few of those games there were for so many years, by which I mean that style of RE game, not games with the words "Resident Evil" in the title. Still, we seem to have plenty of them these days, which is great to see. System Shock was 94, and Resident Evil was 96. I'd be surprised to learn that RE was inspired by System Shock, but perhaps both of them took similar inspiration from Alone in the Dark. Hopefully that remake early next year is good too.
I'd still argue that it's worse than giving the customers the ability to roll out that history. When your incentive is subscription fees, then you're trying to keep people playing longer, which means making the game grindier. At that point, it's trivial to add hours and hours of content, because it takes so long to make the numbers go up. World of WarCraft may have lasted 20 years, but I can't legally play City of Heroes anymore.
The money to fund those updates has to come from somewhere, and the incentive systems behind those games leads to, inevitably, the game being wiped from the face of the earth. Plus you lose access to the earlier versions of the game, which may have been better; if not for you, then for someone else.