Video games in 2023: Acquisitions, layoffs, unions

This was a year of upheaval in video games. The industry has shapeshifted over the past 12 months, and it's not all due to Microsoft's lengthy acquisition of Activision, Blizzard and King. While Xbox executives were defending the legality of a $69 billion deal that would create the third-largest video game studio in the world, smaller companies were firing staff and shutting down entire teams, even amid fervent collective-bargaining efforts. It's been a wild ride. In 2023, the main factors molding the video game landscape were consolidation, layoffs and unionization, with each of these phenomena feeding into each other.