MSFT as an employer and work environment has industry standard (very good) ESG / DEI stuff, and work life balance is apparently excellent.

Contrast with Activision's stewardship of grinding their workers in to bloody dust, and sprinkling sexual abuse on top. Kotic has to go. Before this acquisition became a news story the news was full of employee lawsuits and California itself initiating action against the awful management.

If life gets considerably better for Blizzard workers under new leadership, they can make better products.

The sexual abuse scandal is what finally broke me free from World of War craft. I had been playing WoW since the invite only beta.

My gaming backlog is still insanely huge and I won't be going back.

Arguably their best and most succesfull games were produced by hard grinding devs that loved the game they were wotking on and the gamers that played them.

You can feel about ESG/DEI however you wamt, but it has nothing to do with producing great games.

What if you feel that it’s integral to producing good games because it means people who care about it will come work there.

This fetishization of crunch as somehow unavoidable is disgusting.

Or maybe people that don't care about games nor gamers will prefer to work there and spend their time on other things, who's to say?

The 'modern' output is what it is and it was disliked by the majority of the player-base, so much that if it wasn't for re-releases of the old content some of their franchises would be near dead.

Your argument that gaming is getting worse and more popular is absurd on it’s face.