>It's painful to think of how much they own these days, weird they haven't faced Meta level anti-trust yet despite being way more of a monopoly imo.

Because Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on Gaming.

Nintendo and Sony hold huge shares. Steam owns a large percentage of games sales on PCs.

And iOS and Android gaming combined are bigger than PC and console gaming.

Other businesses besides gaming, I don't know. I know Microsoft does not have a monopoly on gaming.

However, I do think that them buying up large game studios will ultimately be bad for consumers. They're swinging money left and right to try to become a monopoly.

Maybe it's just me but I don't remember ever seeing lawmakers and politics perceiving gaming as a serious economy like other forms of entertainment.

It seems it's still all fun and games made by individuals in some basement.

Until the content of a specific game is offending someone, then it's suddenly a political issue until that one game is gone.

Would be good to have a serious political discussion not only about the dopamine machine social media, but also about the millions of "cow clicker" games and how also those may impact on youth and the nation as a whole...

It's not just gaming, entertainment in general. I hope no other industries would have been allowed to consolidate, vertically and horizontally, as much. Having a very limited number of content producers that also handle their exclusive distribution (and in the case of gaming, exclusive hardware) isn't great for the consumer.