Ready at Dawn, Typhoon, PlayGiga, BigBox VR are developers. Population is a game by BigBox not a developer or publisher
You said developers in your original question, so why bother reiterating as if I wasn't listing developers? You asked for developers they acquired, and I gave them to you. Minus maybe one.
A publisher is not just a collection of developers. It is distribution, data, IPs and brands as well as all of the developers in its network. It is completely different to buying a single developer and your false equivalence and baseless fear mongering that Google or Facebook would have done it doesn't change that
That's still essentially a collection of developers. I also mentioned distribution as being one of the main differentiators, otherwise data, IP and brands are nothing wholly unique to a publisher as each developer has at least one if not all of these things for themselves. A publisher just coalesces that into an integrated network collective.
How am I fear-mongering, exactly? Give a clear example of where that's occurred. I've got no reason to fearmonger because acquisitions don't make me fearful to begin with, they just happen. Consolidation doesn't make me fearful because that's happened in virtually every other industry on the face of the planet, how's gaming any different when it's now the largest entertainment industry in the world?
That doesn't mean I cheerlead for acquisitions or consolidation, but it does mean I'm not going to bother fighting against them if and when they happen. I don't need to fearmonger another conglomerate making a big acquisition to ethically justify support for Microsoft acquiring Activision-Blizzard, because for one my "support" only goes as far as acknowledging it's happening and working with things as they are (and being optimistic in that regard). But more importantly, I don't see this acquisition in particular as being "problematic" considering the issues of culture at Acti/Blizzard, lapse of various IP of theirs, and what ownership through Microsoft could enable in improving workplace cultural issues while bringing back new entries in favored legacy IP Acti/Blizzard themselves would likely never engage with on their own.
MS was an outsider, so was Sony, so was Nintendo even, when they were making playing cards. Nobody is buying big publishers except him and he's trying to sell you that idea as a good thing with a story about the bogeyman. He is the big tech corp trying to buy the market.
If some other big tech corp entered the market it's no different and nothing suggests they will destroy it. There isn't some artificial cut off that's lapsed to when others can try and enter the market and do things differently.
What's the difference between Microsoft buying a major publisher in Activision-Blizzard, and Sony buying timed and full exclusivity on 3rd-party games and franchises that were at one point associated with Nintendo and Sega (back when Sony entered the market with PS1), when both have essentially the same effect? I.e a shifting of some percentage of market ownership that negatively impacts rival platform holders in some way or another?
Because if we agree that effect is the case here with the MS/Acti acquisition, then there's nothing fundamentally stopping you from agreeing with that conclusion in the Sony example, or even the more moderate examples of Sony purchasing timed or full exclusivity on 3P software. Those are also acquisitions, of various software releases, with the intent of shifting some (sizable) percentage of market ownership that negatively impacts rival platform holders in some way or another.
This argument about "but they aren't a publisher!" is really just semantics; at the end of the day the potential impact in how it can influence the customer base to spend (and in what ecosystems) is effectively the same. By making such arrangements over the years one can argue that Sony have purchased their way towards a monopoly of the traditional home gaming market in piecemeal, since those timed and full 3P exclusives have had direct impacts on what platforms a lot of gamers end up buying, and thus where they spend the majority of their money. That is, if you want to call what Microsoft is doing in purchasing Activision-Blizzard a monopoly. Of which, their own numbers have shown it isn't; you can give some leeway to say that maybe in due time it would if it leads to over 50% of the gaming market spending in Microsoft's ecosystem, but how does even that become provable as a monopoly when their ecosystem is spread out between Xbox consoles (which some analysts are saying get outsold by PlayStation 2:1 this year), PC (primarily on Steam, a storefront platform owned by Valve, not Microsoft (and also available on Linux)), and mobile (via cloud streaming access in either an app form no different from other mobile software, or through a browser)?
Simple answer is, you can't, and neither will the FTC nor SEC be able to prove anything resembling a monopoly happening here, neither in the traditional home gaming market or the larger gaming market. However, if one wanted to be cheeky enough, they could potentially prove grounds of enough instances of Sony leveraging money for timed exclusivity and full exclusivity 3P deals, to drive their way towards owning a large enough portion of the traditional gaming market that could be considered monopolistic. One of the only things that would temper such an attempt is Nintendo's own revenue, but that gets tricky considering what you classify the Switch as at a fundamental level. Since most would classify it as a portable, then in the space of a traditional, stationary home gaming console, a monopolistic argument could in theory be made for Sony given their practices over the years.
I'm pretty sure Sony and Microsoft both have lawyer teams that have taken these sort of things into consideration, so in the off-chance there are people hoping Sony or Son & Nintendo "challenge" this acquisition as being monopolistic, that wouldn't be a very wise move for either.