I think its not really a question for Xbox fans or gamers but rather gamers in general. I think most gamers should at least be concerned by the continued trend of consolidation of the industry. More so when its by a specific platform holder, as the concern of exclusivity will rise.

From a gamer who has a PS and PC this move by MS in the coming years could potentially force me to either upgrade my PC or buy an Xbox. Whereas previously I could most probably live without the relatively small offering from Xbox with regards to exclusives.

The same can be said for any other platform holder that may in future go after a massive publisher. Lets say Sony or Apple decide to buy EA and potentially make Apex Legends, Fifa, Dragons Age and Star Wars games all exclusive. That would suck way more than missing out on new IP made inhouse by Sony or whoever.

Lets just hope other companies don't have the same money and interests as MS. I think we can all survive the massive shakeup MS has made to the landscape. However others decide to follow suite, we going to potentially have to suffer through extreme segmentation of the community and most likely be forced to buy additional platforms in some way. Keeping in mind that MS hasn't actually made crazy changes with regards to big multiplatform games yet, and I hope they don't in the future, as that is when the response will come from other platform holders more urgently.

Why wouldn’t Xbox fans be excited?

More games on GamePass
Better games with Azure money bankrolling them
Zero chance of Sony paying for timed exclusives or chopping out exclusive content

I’ll be enjoying Starfield on my Series X next year. Guarantee if MS hadn’t bought Bethesda, Sony would have paid for 12+ month exclusive window on consoles or paid to set aside some missions as PS exclusive.

This is outdated. 

I would say they're taking a bit to get a lot of their development ramped up, but they have a lot of great stuff in the works. They have tons of teams, both first party and third party working on tons of titles.

"Microsoft will want to capitalise on the purchase"

I think there are different ways of doing this. They don't need to make $70 billion off of Activision's games. Activision itself has a value, and if things didn't go the way they expected, they would likely sell Activision for a hefty sum. They don't need to make that $70 billion back from other stuff. And MS overall makes a lot of money. 

In short, they don't really need to make money off this. And they're not really aiming to make money off this in the way you're thinking of.

They're not just getting Activision as some fixed entity, they're getting the studios and the workforce. 

I think there has been some desire for Activision to start making other titles besides CoD, and more games besides.

Microsoft has been heavily criticized for it's lack of diverse range of first party titles, when compared to nintendo and sony, and people were expecting xbox to step up it's game this gen and compete wit sony and give the gamers more exclusives.
Microsoft did step up their game big time at the end of last gen and his continuing the trend with this aquisition. 

Instead what you get is the aquisition.
Which is awesome

Microsoft will want to capitalise on the purchase , the salesand get as much out of each title it can.
Just like they want to capitalize on studios already under their belt. Just like Sony want to capitalize on all their assets.

It's ultimate goal is to make gamepass the must have thing for gamers on the market.
Can't argue with that, but I see no harm in this, ultimately consumer will decide it's faith.

Microsoft now has to make up for the cost of the aquisition.
Completely wrong, that's not how things works when you acquire company. You make up for the investment by maintaining and hopefully increasing the value of those assets. 

I highly doubt that microsoft will now  be able or even want to, invest  in their own internal studios output of exclusives, alaong with other third party exclusives, in such a way that would have other wise put them on level with what sony and nintendo.
And now you have to completely ignore facts to even give credibility to your statement. The projects pipeline are as full as can be and Xbox game studio have multiple projects with third party including with Kojima productions. 

I just can't see how that's feasible going forward.
It's not only feasible but happening as we speak.

As a gamepass subscriber, yes there will be plenty of games coming overall, but without the aquisition,  you would have been getting all those quality titles and future new ip's as multiplat, along with a even stronger first party lineup from microsoft if they actually decided to do something about it.
If Microsoft was not doing aquisition, half to 2/3 of bethesda Ips would still be timed excusive to Sony's system. Same thing for CoD DLC. All activision/blizzard studio would eventually become CoD dev/support studios. Bobby Kotick and friends would continue there horrendous management policies unchallenged. At least now Activision blizzard will have a shot at righting the wrong. Under Microsoft policies, studios would also work on what motive them not just boring support works that make those with ambition and talents leaves like if their house is on fire.   

Sorry, no. As development tools become more accessible we see an explosion of indie games and there is no end to that in sight. The majority of titles on each platform already *are* indie games. So the consolidation will not make a real dent into the number of titles, as new indie studios will be founded all the time. Some indies will grow into something bigger too and replace the studios that have been acquired by the likes of Embracer. Only really super-big studios like Zenimax and ABK cannot easily be replaced. But they had a low number of games each year anyways. And it isn't even clear these two will reduce their number of games. For instance Obsidian could really improve it's output under MS, with multiple projects at the same time.

I guess it is time for MS to purchase SquareEnix.

Tell that to CD Projekt and their ambitious plans. We'll see if they can actually hire talented people fast enough to pull off even part of their 10 year plan. But with 80 Billion you can easily afford to train talent, even open a game design university and create new talent.

Actually, I am not currently concerned about this, as I am for instance with Disney becoming dominant in cinema. The reason for that is, that it is currently impossible for *any* company to corner the market. Let look at it in detail:

1. It is quite difficult to create a movie independently, and even indie movie productions have quite some budget. It is also not possible to make a movie alone (mostly), because you need someone behind and in front of the camera - at least. You also need quite some equipment. But producing a game is possible for a single person with a computer - all the tools are widely available and quite accessible. So even single developers that quit in a bigger company can easily start producing their own games and completely new devs are joining the industry daily.

2. For an indie movie producer it is very hard to get your movie into distribution. Distribution channels are often quite merged with the producing companies. Even established movie producers have difficulities - if they are from other countries. India is a big movie producer, but they have a hard time to get into western markets, as they cannot reach the western distribution channels. Streaming services may make it easier in the future, as for instance the big indian movie RRR is on Netflix. But still this remains difficult for smaller companies. As an independent game producer though it is extremely simple to sell your game via Steam, Gog, itch.io or maybe even some other. Even distributing on console got a lot easier and all three major platform holders made processes to get more indies on their platform.

3. Success. As a newcomer success in general is difficult. And this is always true. But looking at the game market, it is very possible for a small team without prior name in the market to gain success. Minecraft, Valheim, Among Us are proof of that. Even on smaller levels, games like Undertale, Cave Story, Shantae, Five Nights at Freddies, The Binding of Isaac, Shovel Knight, Terraria, Stardew Valley, Hollow Knight, Rocket League all reached numbers even bigger established studios can struggle to reach. So being big is no guarantee for success, but being small not a reason not to be.

That all shows: it is impossible for any company to reach complete dominance over the gaming market, because all the time more studios pop up and more competition is born. So yes, at this moment in time I am not concerned about the acquisitions.

This excuse cracks me up. Zenimax's effect hasn't come into play yet because they haven't released anything major in a while, Starfield will be their first big release post acquisition, MS playing the victim and acting like Zenimax/ABK aren't that big of a deal and comparing them to Sony's moves is comedy gold.

But I don't think people need to panic yet, coz huge acquisitions for MS should be near impossible after ABK, which I'm not 100% sure it will go through. I think it is the end point as far as major publishers are concerned. For software sales (across all platforms), they are the biggest fish in the pond, bigger than Nintendo unless they turn every major game exclusive to Xbox and PC, then maaaybe not. But of course they will pretend they're poor, sick, and hungry whenever convenient ?

Yes, more of those, less ABK/Zenimax/Mojang (small but not really) please. I hope I didn't give the impression that I didn't know about Microsoft's smaller acquisition/partnerships which were reasonable, hence virtually nobody complained about them. ABK and Zenimax are on a completely different scale. To put things into perspective, MS bought ABK for more than twice the revenue (not profit. REVENUE ffs) COD generated throughout its entire history.

One thing that gets me about those that are upset about this deal is have we all forgotten how TERRIBLE Activision Blizzard is and how we all were hoping the company would eventually crash and burn??? Probably would've eventually done exactly that at how it was going, but I digress. Now all of a sudden, it's not about how terrible the company is, it's all about where the games are going instead of looking at what the positive changes that could come out of this.

ActiBlizz was getting sued left and right, executives outright lying about the work environment, constant walkouts at Blizzard because of how terrible of a place it is to work at, profits above all else creativity be damned, Activision becoming only a single IP publisher, Blizzard releasing dumpster fires for games (still pissed about Warcraft 3: Reforged) Overwatch 2 being their most recent. ActiBlizz is arguably one of, if not the worst company in gaming. But, all that doesn't matter now. It's all about where you can play the games. Which isn't going to be changing any time soon btw, if it happens at all with the likes of CoD. And who knows how many other issues I'm leaving out.

The sale is going to finalize. I'm personally focusing more on the positive outcomes of this deal because one thing's for sure, it can't get any worse than it has been.

Blizzard was my favorite gaming company growing up outside of Nintendo and Bungie. I'm holding on for any sliver of hope that some of that Blizzard magic can return. This deal gives me some of that hope.