In the 80s and 90s, third party exclusives were a necessity because you were making games for sets of hardware that were capable of dramatically different things.
But if Microsoft did something so nefarious to Windows gaming, enough people could switch to Linux to punish them for it, since the last 5 years were spent making nearly every game work on Linux regardless. Microsoft tried to use their position to get you to buy every game through their store, and the market rejected it. That 90% they have currently is now afforded the privilege to be fickle with Windows usage, when before they didn't have the option.
If you bring up Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, especially since we're talking about Microsoft, that is not what it means, and your definition has issues, because if you're buying a big company for a lot of money, the last thing you want to do is extinguish it.
It's still an improper invocation of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish regardless; only Call of Duty came along with this sale, so by your own logic, they still can't have a monopoly; there are several other franchises, owned by several other corporate entities that Microsoft doesn't own, that would fit on that list of yours; and IMO, Resistance was never good anyway, so if they want to make their own Call of Duty, they're starting from scratch, and they've got a decade to figure it out.
FPS games are in dire straits if you like the kind of stuff we got 10-20 years ago, but so many other genres are thriving right now. Give it 5 years, and the indie scene will likely up the FPS market that AAA forgot; right now, they're chasing late 90s arena shooters rather than the slightly-slower, somewhat-grounded-in-some-sort-of-reality action blockbusters we got in the early 2000s through the 2010s.
And Halo Infinite's multiplayer was almost what I wanted out of a Halo game. Better than what Halo had between 3 and 5.
Video games aren't in danger of becoming a monopoly, but that kind of measure seems more aimed at preventing foreigners from having too much influence.
The big publishers' moneymaking franchises have plateaued or declined without anything to replace them, and they're looking to sell their companies before those franchises stop making money. EA and Disney have a partnership via Star Wars that could work out toward making an acquisition or merger more affordable. Disney would probably have a hard time growing by acquiring more television or movie studios, but video games are in a different industry. Disney might see acquiring a giant like EA to be acquiring "experts" at how to actually run a video game business compared to Disney's failed past efforts.
Those are the reasons I can think of. EA was rumored to have hit up every enormous company like this to buy them out, including Apple and Amazon, so it doesn't surprise me that Disney was on that list.
No, I'm saying I've seen people who keep playing games with this kind of battle pass, loot box, or other reward system when they clearly stopped enjoying the game, the same way any addict keeps doing something they know is harmful to themselves. Systems like these (and again, I have no idea what kind CS2 implements, but it's a modern online live service game, so it's probably in the ballpark) just want you to be a body in the online queue so that other players have someone to play with, and they chase that goal through nefarious means.
But because they have no impact on the gameplay, the onus is entirely on the player whether they want it or not
You get no advantage from the battle passes in Street Fighter 6 either, but they're still designed in such a way to keep you chasing the rewards. It can be scummy without being pay to win. But again, I don't know what hooks CS2 has. Last I played CS:GO was when it was $15 and had no microtransactions.
I haven't checked in on Counter-Strike in a long time, but we can and should call out shitty business practices designed to exploit gambling addiction to make you play when you don't want to. I'm not equipped to assess whether CS is designed that way, but gaming in general is not predatory and addicting in this way.