the tone around the (Microsoft-Actiblizzard) merger was largely dominated by vocally supportive Xbox players and commentators

Excuse me, what? I guess my social bubble is thick as fuck, because I didn't see a single person supporting that megacorp scale merger.

These two concurrent pushes (of marketing good vibes image) resulted in a landscape that was, at best, reluctant to discuss the potential harm of its acquisitions and, at worst, actively rejected it because Xbox’s “good guy” image and messaging had so thoroughly seeped into the foundations of shared community spaces and broader gaming consciousness

Feels like a load of bullshit, then again I don't even know where the cool kids hang out, so it could be me.

The superficial artifice of Xbox’s brand permeates every corner of video game marketing. It’s an endless parade of phrases that don’t quite mean anything and campaigns designed to romanticise and humanise the company’s seemingly bottomless appetite for growth at all costs.

I guess this is why I didn't buy into the previous paragraphs, I just assumed people were "too smart" to fall for so much corporate bullshit.

Microsoft closed the day with a $3 trillion valuation for the first time in the company’s history.

3 trillion with roughly 20k employees now. I wonder how much of that value is assigned to its workforce, like "of the 3 trillion our company's worth, our workers are worth 100 billion" or something.