It's not a full-blown PlayStation 5 announcement, but it's a whole lot more substantive than your typical vague C-suite comments.

May 22 marks Sony's IR Day, a time when the company's top executives step forward to speak with investors about the past, present, and future of the business. The annual meeting's gaming segment came with a big revelation: 2021 is going to be an important year for the PlayStation brand.

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Speaking to investors, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO and president John Kodera suggested – via a translation by Wall Street Journal reporter Takashi Mochizuki – that the PlayStation brand's next big leap won't happen until March 2021.

The translation is a little muddled here, so let's take a look at the tweet (and a key response) so you have the right facts in hand. Here's what Mochizuki actually wrote:

Tweet may have been deleted

A subsequent response from Siliconera writer and Japanese translator Sato rephrased the "crouch down once" translation as "taking a breath" in Siliconera's own report.

Tweet may have been deleted

Unclear translation aside, the implication in Kodera's comments seems to be that PlayStation fans can expect a relatively quiet period on the hardware front until March 2021. Maybe that's when Sony hopes to release its next PlayStation. Or maybe that's just when it will be announced.

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History supports the latter theory. The PlayStation 3 was an E3 announcement in 2005, but Sony went a different route for the PlayStation 4, revealing its new hardware in Feb. 2013.

The company never articulated the reason for this change, but it seemed clear enough: There's a lot of extraneous noise surrounding any E3 announcement, since it's one of the biggest annual stages for gaming reveals. On the other hand, a standalone unveiling in February, a generally light month for games, gave Sony an opportunity to own the news cycle.

It's important to note that forward-looking statements coming out of investor meetings should never be taken as concrete utterances of fact. Sony is likely targeting March 2021 (or thereabouts) for some big leap for the PlayStation brand, but any surely tentative plans could easily change in the coming years.

Kodera also noted (again, per Mochizuki) that the PS4 "is entering the final phase of its life cycle." The console originally launched in Nov. 2013, so the end of this year marks its fifth in production. It's almost certain to stick around for some amount of time even after a successor launches That's fairly common; Xbox 360 production shut down in 2016 and PS3 followed suit a year later.

Tweet may have been deleted

Don't read too much into the "final phase" comment; the PS4 still has a lot of life left in it. Sony revealed in April that lifetime sales for the console hit 79 million. That's almost as much as the PS3's roughly 80 million sold and more than half the PS2's 150 million-plus sales -- the most for any game console, ever.

It's a huge sales figure after only five years (really, four and a half years) on store shelves. If the pace continues, PS4 could easily supplant its PS2 predecessor as the all-time top-selling console. Sony's not going to pull the cord until there's a fully-baked successor at the ready.

Kodera's "final phase" comment makes for a good soundbite, but the real news here is the revelation that March 2021 is an important month on PlayStation's calendar. And though that may be subject to change, this is really the first concrete insight from Sony into how it views the overall PS4 life cycle.

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TopicsGamingPlayStation