What will happen if Microsoft exits the console market? We can't be down to only two console makers. -_-

Gaming will be better off.

But competition breeds quality and variety.

Looks like a lot of studios and people from both the Zenimax and Activision/Blizzard acquisitions were hit as well. This further cements my belief that the deals were much more about IPs and rights than actual talent.

This is one of the greatest issues of the mega-corporation structure as a business model - you'll have people at the top making absurd amounts of money, and companies can even be in the black, but not as much as shareholders would like. This then leads to the mass-firing of people further down the ladder, with memos referring to "strategy" and "aim". If all these people who were fired were part of individual, or smaller efforts, and not under the ownership of one huge entity; it's very unlikely that as many of them, if any at all, would be getting kicked out now. And what's happening now is the exact reason why some of us were so negative to these acquisitions by Microsoft to begin with. It turns out that all the hollering about how good this was for the industry and every party in it, were all hollow words, precisely as some of said at the time.

It seems to have bred buying up and closing studios, cancelling projects and chasing stupid GAAS games, while devaluing games with deep sales and subscriptions to the point people won't pay full price for legitimately good games anymore.

Nintendo is doing the best after bowing out of the console race and still produces quality and variety without any competition in the handheld space.

So what will happen to all the Microsoft gaming IPs? Would they have to be sold off?

Join all the other dormant Microsoft gaming IPs :(

MS will still release games but all the hopes of reviving old IPs after MS paid 68 billion for Acti-Blizzard are pretty much dead. We'll just get the biggest well known ones rehashed and milked until they face the same fate as Halo and Forza Motorsport :/