Sony will continue to support the PlayStation 3 for at least “the next couple of years”, despite the imminent release of the PlayStation 4

“PS3 has been doing great – but it’s not like everyone owns a PS3 already,” Worldwide Studios boss, Shuhei Yoshida, explained. “There’s always a group of consumers who come late in the cycle, people who wait for the price to come down. We’re expanding geographically as well. The demand from Latin America, for example, is really really strong for PS3.”

“So we’ll have a parallel strategy with PS3 and PS4, like we had between PS2 and PS3. PS3 was launched in 2006, in the sixth year of PS2, but PS2 lasted for another five years. I don’t know if PS3 will last another five years – but definitely for the next couple of years, because of the price difference, the great library of games and the publisher side being able to support both.”

“There’ll even be new games. We were talking about indie games – many indie announcements at GamesCom were for games coming to PS4, PS Vita and PS3. These guys also support multi-generation platforms, so there’ll continue to be a great supply of games.”

Despite pledging continuing support for the PlayStation 3, Yoshida did acknowledge that, naturally, the number of AAA games being developed for the platform would probably start declining. Speaking specifically about the Worldwide Studios’ development efforts, he revealed that their focus is currently being shifted from the current console to the PS4.

“We’ll continue to support PS3 in a way that makes sense, especially the digital games that we work on – but our large teams, our AAA release teams, are transitioning from PS3 to PS4.”

Last month Microsoft announced it’ll continue to support the Xbox 360 until 2016, with over 100 new games in the pipeline. It seems Sony will be working to a similar time-frame, though it’s less clear how many new titles we’ll be seeing. The PlayStation 4 will be available in North America on November 15 and in Europe on November 29.