I don't know what world you're living in. Almost everywhere on planet Earth, you're free to leave your job at any time, and there are other options available. That includes the option to start your own business, do gig work, or not work at all. There are virtually no situations where someone is tethered to an employer. If you set yourself up in a way where leaving a job is unreasonable for you, that's on you. That's not on the employer.. There are courts to sort out payment issues, if your employer tries to fuck you on your way out the door.

There certainly are many situations where employers treat employees poorly. My argument does not that everything is always great. My argument is that government is a net negative.  

Anyway, we're not going to agree on this. In your case, government getting involved was a net negative. A company should be able to fire you at any time, for any reason, with no compensation other than that which they have contractually agreed to with you, without threat of government force.  So, unless your employer agreed to some sort of job security for you that wasn't mandated by law, they should have been free to reduce your hours to zero, or just fire you in the middle of day on Monday because they don't like the color of shirt you're wearing.  If they did have some sort of voluntary contract with you, then there are courts to sort that out.  

They don't need to add fees, just undercut the other streaming services with GPU. To play those MS games on other streaming services you need to pay them and pay MS for playing the games. Either by buying them or via subscription. Now comes xCloud with a lower overall cost since MS can easily undercut them already owning the biggest server farm (which the other streaming services likely rent for their own service, like Sony uses Azure as well).

It's not really competition when you're the one holding the infrastructure and the content. That's what the CMA sees.

It's definitely not just a feeling. Consolidation is already here, the question is, how much worse can it get? It ramped up considerably after Microsoft spent 7.5B on Zenimax. What would a near 70B deal do? 

Look at the M&A activity in the industry over the past couple of years: Its the most active Sony has been, and this includes one of their biggest transactions ever, Microsoft made their biggest acquisition ever, and Tencent is still spending billions. We got rumors that EA wants to merge with a media company, that Ubisoft is looking to sell, and all the big tech companies looking to jump in. We even have Take Two spending over 10B for Zynga, Sega spending over a billion for Rovio, EA acquiring Codemasters for a billion, etc. All these transactions are unprecedented for the industry. 

Personally I don't care. I'm happy that this is over to say the truth. lol

Yes, but that's just the reality of every market, MS is gonna own those products so they should be receiving payment every time a license is attributed to a user that's just normal. Now to know if they are going to undercut another streaming service that's not cut and dry. These services still will be bringing in revenue to MS, as you stated because those users need to buy the game through a digital store like Steam or Windows store so the incentive to do so is already greatly mitigated.  

The service MS would be trying to undercut is mostly BYOG which means the service itself is their bread and butter, now if you look at GPU, what's is being sold is a catalog of games with cloud streaming as an additional attractive point which means they need to both finance the content and the cloud service itself out of the fee they charge their user while BYOG service only needs to encompass for the cost of the service, I have a hard time understanding how MS can undercut them sustainably considering this and a hard time believing they would be willing to take a loss when they actually still get revenue and extended reach through those third-party.

Xcloud may have a lower cost, but out of all solutions it's one of the worst in terms of latency and performance as of now and this won't change as long as they focus on simply using Series X hardware on a server rack. They won't change that though cause that would remove all their cost advantages. This means competitors should and are already actually competing on innovation/performance.

Also, that's not what the CMA sees, they actually got no problem BYOG cloud streaming service, they judged MS's remedies sufficient in this regard, their problems are because MS did not propose solutions for other business models such as subscription catalog service or digital store using the cloud as their or as part of their delivery. The issue with this is it creates a paradox, it is impossible for MS to propose actual remedies without having them address other markets outside the scope of the actual cloud market which aren't found to be at risk of SLC. In other words, by wanting MS to propose remedies to cloud providers with multi-game subscription services they are not actually benefiting the cloud aspect of those providers but the multi-game subscription one. e.g. if MS proposes a remedy for digital stores using cloud delivery (aka Stadia before it died) nothing would prevent a store like Epic, not judged at risk of an SLC by the CMA, to add a basic cloud streaming feature and then benefits unduly from the remedy proposal.

The EU did accept the MS proposal because they correctly identified the limit of what is considered the cloud market that does not result in such a paradox

I go at length on exactly that here

I've heard people say that this is bad because Game Pass will increase in price more and more until people are paying a stupid amount because they're locked into the service, now I'm hearing that it's bad because Game Pass will undercut rivals, Lol. As it stands right now, Game Pass Ultimate is $16.99 a month, GeForce Now is either $9.99 a month for the non-free tier or $19.99 a month for the highest tier. Boosteroid is $10.60 a month. Nware is $10.08 a month for Basic and $12.33 a month for Premium.

xCloud's subscription plan is currently being undercut by Boosteroid, Nware and GeForce's 2nd Tier. You're right though, you need to purchase the title to stream the title for Boosteroid, Nware and GeForce Now so that is one advantage that Microsoft has for xCloud with it being attached to Game Pass (if you even want Game Pass) but others have advantages too (more on that later).

Game Pass PC is coming to GeForce Now as well...Despite the fact that GeForce Now runs better in every way than xCloud so why the hell would people then use xCloud? PC Game Pass on its own (no xCloud) would be $9.99 a month and GeForce Now's 2nd tier would be $9.99 a month. Considering GeForce's Now is better than xCloud, the extra $2.99 may be worth spending.

xCloud being attached to Game Pass has not helped it to dominate anything thus far, there are numerous Microsoft emails from the trial expressing disappointment in its metrics, in its usage, xCloud makes Microsoft a loss based on how much it costs to maintain vs the usage. Microsoft shown the courts data which showed that the vast majority of xCloud users were only using it to play games whilst a native version downloads, Lol.

Nobody gives a f*ck about xCloud right now.

xCloud runs at a loss, xCloud does not run on Azure, it runs on Xbox Hardware placed into Azure Datacentres. That means GeForce Now is better than xCloud technologically, that meant Stadia was better than xCloud technologically, that means they can't just spin up their dozens of Azure server farms and dominate anything, they need to physically place Xbox Hardware into every single one of these locations, they need to build Xbox hardware, it needs to be the same hardware being sold to consumers, as such, it gives Microsoft's rivals an advantage in technology (better framerate, resolution, input lag) and gives rivals an advantage in being able to upgrade quicker than Microsoft while Microsoft only upgrade once per console gen.

GeForce doesn't rent, they have their own data centres, Ubitus partners with Google Cloud and Boosteroid partners with ASUS. Don't know who Nware uses. But just because Microsoft has Azure Datacentres doesn't mean Xbox has no costs associated with using them, once again, xCloud runs at a loss. All of these companies have data centres in the key locations. We have no clue how many datacentres have Xbox hardware installed into them but we do know that UK, Microsoft's 2nd largest market, has a concurrent maximum of 5,000 users in xCloud...So it can't be much.

Xbox holds the content, which nobody was getting to begin with, and now they are, thanks to the contracts, Lol.

You also saw a big ramp-up of studios being created since MS bought Bethesda. Those acquisitions are not what's cause consolidation, they happen because the time is propitious to investment in video game industries. The pandemic skyrocket the industry and now growth is through the roof and is expected to remain that way a least for a few years

There were also significant periods of consolidation in the video game market both in the 1970s and the 1990s. Can you say gaming in the 80s and 2000s was worse because of it?

MS is buying IP:s not talent. 

Who makes those IPs?

Unless you believe there's no talent at Bethesda or ABK this statement is factually wrong they're doing both.