Destiny is 10 years old, which is an aeon in video game terms. On the surface, this is a lavish online prog-rock space shooter made by Bungie, the creators of the Xbox classic Halo. You bundle together with friends, deploy somewhere amid the glittering vistas of a futuristic version of our solar system, and then shoot people/aliens/robots to get better loot. None of this is exactly unprecedented, and that's maybe the point. You could argue that Destiny's touchstones are games like Halo, for its gunplay, World of Warcraft, for its persistent online spaces, and – this is where it gets a bit odd, granted – the deathless British retailer Marks & Spencer.

Bungie, the Sony-owned game studio behind Destiny 2, let go of an undisclosed number of staffers, part of a wider restructuring of the Japanese giant's video-game operation. "Today is a sad day at Bungie as we say goodbye to colleagues who have all made a significant impact on our studio," Bungie Chief Executive Officer Pete Parsons wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. Bungie recently delayed an upcoming Destiny 2 expansion, The Final Shape, until June from February, pushing it out of Sony Group's current fiscal year, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak publicly. Bungie's next game, Marathon, slipped to 2025. Sony, which purchased Bungie in early 2022 for $3.6 billion, has been cutting staff across its PlayStation division this year, in part due to delays.

Gaming never went out of style, but in 2020, it evolved from a fun hobby into an essential lifeline. Staying sane isn't easy when you're stuck in isolation for months on end. You can only watch so much Netflix before your brain starts dripping out of your ears. Games provide more active experiences that can help you forget that you've been staring at the same walls for weeks, letting you explore far-away virtual worlds or hang out with friends in multiplayer lobbies. In 2020, gaming became vital.

Google will make its video game streaming service Stadia free for two months while many around the world are living under restrictive shutdown policies. People who register new accounts will have access to Stadia Pro games and services, which allows users to play video games via stream on a laptop, tablet, smartphone, or equipped television. People who already subscribe to Stadia Pro will have their monthly subscription fees waived during the free two month period. The free two months will run through June 8, after which all accounts will be required to pay a monthly subscription fee of $10. The free promotion is available in 14 countries, according to a report in Engadget, including the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland.

The amount of internet usage dedicated to playing video games in the US rose by 75 percent during the first week of the countrywide COVID-19 shutdown. The figure comes from a Verizon report on how internet usage has been affected by the entire country being asked to stay indoors for potentially months on end. While other forms of online entertainment saw boosts over the same period--video streaming rose 12 percent, and general web traffic rose by 20 percent--nothing came close to video games. Several other game-centric businesses saw similar bumps over the same period. The PC gaming platform Steam saw more than 20 million people playing games through the service at the same time, an all-time high.

The PlayStation 4 has dominated the video game market since its release six years ago. Sure, Microsoft's Xbox One is more powerful than the PlayStation 4, but Sony's console spent this generation producing incredible games. Putting software above hardware has been a winning strategy for Sony and it's sold more than 100 million consoles since the PlayStation 4's release in 2013. With more than 2,300 games for the system, it can be hard to pick which game to play. But TIME has you covered.

The Stadia is nothing short of revolutionary. Its core technology delivers on a promise decades in the making: console-quality gaming, without the console. But revolutions have unpredictable outcomes, leave a trail of destruction in their wake, and have a tendency to destroy those who start them. Will Google be able to see this through? Once Stadia is up and running, the system is nearly indistinguishable from playing a game on a console sitting under your TV, except there's no fan noise, no downloads or discs, and, well, no console. The bulk of my time on the Stadia was spent with the system in traditional TV mode.

Can you feel it in the air? The heat is starting to falter. The wind is coming in stronger. Starbucks is about to start selling Pumpkin Spice Lattes. Fall is almost here, and with it come all the biggest video game releases of the year.

The Google Stadia controller used for playing games on Google's video game streaming service. The Stadia controller (priced separately at $69) uses WiFi to connect directly to the game running in Google's video game streaming service .the Google has shed some more clarity on its upcoming cloud-based video game service: an entry price, launch window and some of the games you will be able to play. Google's Stadia will become available in November with an entry price of $129.99 for the Founders Edition package (pre-order on Google's Stadia site), which includes a game controller, Chromecast Ultra streaming device and a three-month subscription. Cloud gaming promises to make it easier for consumers to play online games, as it sidesteps the need for pricey gaming PCs or console video game systems.

Online sci-fi shooter Destiny, released in 2014, had a strange effect on some of its players. Unlike World of Warcraft, or most other games that people play every day, it didn't have hundreds of hours' worth of different planets to visit, enemies to defeat or characters to get to know. You could play through the entirety of Destiny's story in 10 hours; beyond that, it offered only a small selection of daily "strike" missions and an arena to challenge other players in shootouts. Yet people played for hours every day. A significant portion of players spent a thousand hours or more with the game over two or three years, as recorded by the ironically titled WastedOnDestiny.com.