Battle for control: why the age-old console wars show no sign of stopping

It is an exciting time in video game world: two new consoles, the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, are arriving this month. With a long, lonely Covid winter ahead, it is tempting to splash out. New machines bring with them the promise of new worlds, as leaps in technology unlock creative possibilities for game developers. Throughout the 1980s, 90s and 00s, there was a transformational shift every five or so years, blowing apart people's expectations of what you could do in a game, how big a virtual world could be and how you could explore it. It is not quite like that any more.