Despite their artistic and commercial successes, Sony and Microsoft don’t have the stranglehold on gamers they once did. The companies’ respective home video-gaming consoles, the PlayStation and Xbox, are miraculous pieces of user-friendly technology that have nonetheless failed to stop mobile games, virtual reality, resurgent arcades and vintage-gaming emulators from carving out chunks of their markets. That’s good news for all of us stuck at home in 2020. More of us play video games now than ever before, according to a report from DFC Intelligence, with more than 3 billion gamers worldwide and roughly 214 million in America. We’re playing mostly-mobile games like Candy Crush, Minecraft and Fortnite, with “micro-transactions” (small, regular, in-game purchases) whose drip-drip adds up to billions in annual revenue for their developers. The number has only grown since coronavirus shutdowns created a huge, new market of always-at-home consumers looking for novel entertainments — ones that are ideally untethered from politics and pandemics, but also an alternative outlet for playing sports games when the real thing lacks. Ducking trends, video game giants have “thrived” in 2020, according to Nielsen research and others, and “video gaming is at an all-time high.” At one point earlier this year, gaming usage was up as much as 75 percent, according to Verizon. So what else can we play? Here are five things to look forward to in gaming that aren’t exclusive to the forthcoming Xbox Series X (releasing Nov.