Nintendo Co Ltd and Sega Enterprises Ltd have made so much money out of their duopoly of the current generation of video games technology that they were never going to have the field to themselves for very much longer, and among the heavyweights preparing to muscle in on the party is Sony Corp, which says it will next month incorporate a new company, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. It is being established in partnership with Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc, and plans to unveil a next-generation games machine in Japan at the end of next year. The machine promises three-dimensional computer graphics, and will use several high-end microprocessors from the workstation world – Sony currently uses MIPS Technologies Inc chips in its workstations, and presumably it is to those that it is looking. It has set a first year sales target of 1m of the machines, which will use CD-ROM as the software medium. Sony claims its products will have higher performance than Sega machines, and the new venture will develop and market both hardware and software. It will also license the system to games software firms.
