It’s not clear where you should draw the line. The industry has been consoldiating for decades - EA became EA by buying up the competition, Vivendi bought Activision and then Blizard, Midway was bought by Warner Brothers, Square and Enix merged, then years later bought Eidos. Bethesda snapped up id Software, Arkane and Tango Gameworks in 2009-2010. Activision bought out most of it’s partners last gen. The fact that it was very hard for any independent developer of scale to exist is well attested to by people like Obsidian (who talked very publicly about it) and why people like Ninja Theory were attempting to do their “III” thing.
We have entered a phase of acceleration, although it’s hard to pinpoint just one person. THQ Nordic’s M&A spree began in full force in early 2018. Companies like Oculus/Facebook, Amazon and Google bought small developers starting in ~2014. There’s M&A going on at all scales from companies Paradox buying small studios to people like Splash selling to Leyou in the first place to Microsoft buying Zenimax. MS and Embracer Group are the two highest profile, although Tencent is right up there with them in terms of number of companies bought.