The PlayStation 4 is only a year old but the minds at Sony are already thinking ahead. Lately, a Sony executive in Japan has confirmed that there will probably be a PlayStation 5 console in the future.

We are aware that there has been a lot of debate whether the current console generation will be the last or not, still, according to Sony, it won’t. Sony Computer Entertainment’s Masayasu Ito spoke to Nikkei, and he said that he pretty much expects a PlayStation 5 console in the future.

“I think there will be a PlayStation 5. However, I don’t know what form it will have. It could be a physical console, or it could be in the cloud. But even if the form might change, PS5 games will be born. This is what we want.”

As Ito said, the PS5 could maybe a cloud-based solution. Still the challenges with latency and bandwidth will have to be overcome first. In particular if the next generation console will support the upcoming 4K resolution.

Sure, the home console business has had a lot of competition from smartphones and tablets over the past few years – and let’s not forget the gigantic success of Steam either – but as the sales of the PS4 show, there is still a huge market for proper consoles. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One have together sold well over 20 million units during the first year of this console generation. This alone is a good indicator that we’ll have another console generation in the future.

Hopefully the PS5 will be a proper and powerful console that supports 4K gaming. We’re guessing no later than 2018.