E3 2015: will living room PCs and virtual reality shake up the console war?

Smartphones were once the major disruptive force in the games industry, but now Steam Machines and immersive entertainment technologies are set to stir things up again

For the past 30 years, the console wars have always played out in pretty much the same way. A new set of machines arrives with more powerful processors and graphics hardware than their predecessors. The console manufacturers compete directly against each other to get the best exclusive games and the best versions of multi-platform releases. The platforms mature, and rumours begin about more powerful hardware on the horizon. The cycle begins again.

But this year's E3 exhibition in Los Angeles sits slap bang in the middle of interesting intersection the dedicated games console business. From one direction comes a host of new rivals, from another, the dawn of an entirely new interactive entertainment technology. Of course, the traditional console business has been threatened before. Some analysts once thought that smartphones and tablets would strangle the market for dedicated games machines, others speculated that the resurgent PC, augmented by the digital games distribution platform Steam, would render them obsolete.