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.

One of the only announcements at this year's Gamescom, an event replete with games to play but usually light on news (as Keith wrote in last week's newsletter), was that the demon-killing, time-deleting action RPG Diablo IV's second "season" would start on 17 October. That means new stuff for its 12 million players to do – vampiric powers feature heavily. But given that this game only came out in June and its first season of new content started in late July, it also means that its developers will have been working nonstop since its launch to get yet more game content ready to go. I have often wondered how the makers of live service games – "forever games" that essentially wish to monopolise a player's attention over an extended period of time, a still relatively new genre and business model that's emerged in the last 10 years – manage these brutal schedules. Twenty years ago, studios would release a game and that would be it; 10 years ago, they'd be on the hook for a patch or maybe a downloadable expansion, but not such an endless stream of content. So I asked Diablo's GM, Rod Fergusson – who has been running games teams for more than two decades, most famously with Epic Games on Gears of War – how they manage it.

If there's a bright side to be wrung out of this year's Thanksgiving holiday weekend, it's that four days of enforced solitude have never met a better companion than two brand-new video game consoles. On the PlayStation 5, I continued my exploits as Miles Morales, and my wife and I got some co-op time with Sackboy, the newest title in the Little Big Planet franchise; on the Xbox Series X, I dove into Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War's campaign. It was an endless sensory buffet of ray-tracing, 4K quality, new controller smell, and minimal load times--with no lines, no distractions, and no sneeze guard necessary. Yet, even with this massive digital cornucopia at my fingertips, why did I still spend so much goddamn time playing a free match-3 game on my phone? Here's the truth of it: Since first downloading it 466 days ago, there's nothing I've played more, or enjoyed more, than Marvel Puzzle Quest.