@bart I honestly don't know enough US law to tell whether a distinction should be made between a first-party developing, say, Zelda in-house to only ever be a Switch game, and a company buying a third-party, making it first-party, and killing plans in progress to release on other platforms.
If there should be a difference, we can also point to Halo, which started as a MacOS prototype before Microsoft acquired Bungie and had them retarget it as an XBox exclusive.
@mtomczak @bart Was also gonna reply there’s a huge difference imo. Building an exclusive IP vs buying and locking it up seems to me the definition of anticompetitive.
Microsoft hoards because it can afford to. Franchises that *used* to be everywhere can become exclusive.
CoD is a distraction to the big picture imo, eg:
BSG: Starfield, Elder Scrolls, Fallout
Arcane: Dishonoured, Deathloop
Id/Machine Games: DOOM, Quake, Wolfenstein
Blizzard: Diablo, Overwatch, World of Warcraft