This month, I'd like you all to gather round, bow your heads respectfully, and offer up a moment's contemplative silence.

There's been a death in the videogame family.

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So whose lifeless body are the vultures gathering around? Well, to get straight to the point, it's Sega's.

Now, I know it's hardly a surprise. The poor old duffer's been hacking up foul-coloured phlegm and lumps of blood for a couple of years, but the situation's finally gone terminal.

The big giveaway was a bizarre series of events which took place in the USA early last week, which you might not have heard about. So listen up, and I'll tell you what went on.

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Firstly, Sega Of Japan announced that, as of March 31 this year, the Saturn would no longer be manufactured, sold or supported anywhere in the world outside of Japan.

This announcement apparently came of something of a surprise to Sega Of America, who issued a strenuous denial a couple of days later.

However, a quick look at the Saturn release schedule for this year (and a quick look's all you'll need) tells a pretty different story.

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As far as anyone knows, there are just FOUR Saturn games due for release in 1998 (House Of The Dead, Shining Force 3, Burning Rangers and Panzer Dragoon Saga), after which everything goes quiet. Third party developers have already departed the scene altogether.

The truth of the matter is this: the Saturn is dead. And with the Saturn, goes Sega's future as a console hardware developer. In one of the quickest reversals of fortune in business history, they've been crushed under the wheels of Sony. But why?

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In the early 1990s, Sega could do no wrong. The Mega Drive inexplicably stomped all over the SNES (despite both inferior hardware AND software), money cascaded in in waves, and everything in the garden was rosy.

At this point, Sega's confidence was understandably sky-high, and when Sony announced their entrance into the games world, the company (having already seen off the mighty Nintendo), fatally underestimated their new competitor.

This, it turned out, was a big mistake.

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Figures in last week's Guardian which suggested that the Playstation has outsold the Saturn in the UK by 12 to 1 were probably inaccurate. But not all that inaccurate. It's been a rout.

(If you're wondering where all this is going, bear with me for just a moment.)

How on Earth could things suddenly go so spectacularly wrong? How can a company go from undisputed No.1 to abject defeat in just four years? The answer, it turns out, is a lot less complicated than you might think.

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The answer can be summed up in four words: Complacency, incompetence and penny-pinching.

While Sony went out of their way to be friendly and helpful, sending games and Playstations out free to ANYONE who might be of use to them (games mags, non-games mags, papers, shop owners, ordinary gamers), Sega remained aloof.

If you got any review material out of them, it was made clear that they were doing you a big favour, and everything was expected back in a few days.

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Journalists, newly used to the Sony way of doing things, resented Sega's arrogance hugely. Before either machine was even launched in the UK, Sega had utterly lost the PR war. People were just dying to write up the PS, and frankly the Saturn could get stuffed.

Amazingly, this situation continued for almost two years after the Saturn's launch. Meanwhile, Sony piled on the charm, with dramatic price cuts, a range of top-quality budget software, signing up big-name developers, and being really nice to everyone.

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(Personally, despite writing for magazines with more readers than every games mag in the country put together, I've only been able to get Saturn games to review for the last year or so, when it was already too late.)

Despite blockbusting software like Virtua Fighter 2, Virtua Cop and Sega Rally, Sega steadily fell further and further behind, and when Nintendo launched the N64, Sega were almost immediately dumped into third place, despite a two-year head start. By now, the company was losing a fortune.

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Which more or less brings us to where we are now. The Saturn is staring down the rifles of the firing squad, and Sega have lost their place in the games hardware market forever.

(I'm prepared to say, right here and now, that whatever happens, the Katana or Dural or whatever it ends up getting called has NO chance whatsoever of restoring Sega's fortunes. Apart from anything else, Sega have lost so much money recently that they can't AFFORD to get behind it in the way they should have with the Saturn. It's too late.)

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Sony have proved so sure-footed and streetwise with their first venture into the console business that it's simply impossible to see them ever relaxing their grip. With the PS, they've built a brand name which could last, like the Walkman, for decades.

The really worrying thing, though, is that Nintendo seem to be hellbent on making the same mistakes as Sega. (For a start, they seem to have completely failed to notice that the average games buyer is now almost 10 years older than most SNES and MD owners were.)

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Nintendo have also failed to learn from the SNES/Mega Drive war that having by far the best software is, on its own, no guarantee of success.

And, crucially, they seem to be every bit as big a bunch of short-sighted tightwads as Sega were (you wouldn't believe the trouble Mr Biffo and I have to go to to get N64 games for our respective review pages - we're also both STILL waiting for a load of stuff Nintendo promised us last December).

We can only review what we've got, man.

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The point of all this, of course, is that it's hardly surprising so many of you think everyone's biased towards the Playstation. The simple fact is, Sony give people things to write about and Nintendo (and Sega, rest their souls) don't, so they get a lot more coverage.

(It's surprising, isn't it, that professional PR agencies seem unable to spot this amazingly obvious fact?)

The demise of Sega is just a warning. If Nintendo aren't careful, they're going to go the same way.

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And that won't be good news for any of us. Because without strong competition,

Sony will completely monopolise the games market, and be able to get away with anything they like.(So, basically, expect even more really terrible snowboarding games, forever.)