After spending lord-knows how much money developing the Cell processor, and losing a nice chunk on each PS3 sold these days, I am guessing that Sony executives might be kicking themselves in their cushy executive seats right now. They're not moving consoles and their software library is looking pretty dismal indeed. While professional "analysts" are predicting that the PS3 will take the lead in the console wars several years from now, I'm not too confident in their projections, and even then, they might not make enough back to see a profit in the end. There is no way any software title is going to sell as many consoles as Halo 3 will probably end up selling, and that includes MGS4 and FF13, which I am convinced are more niche games compared to Halo's mainstream appeal. After all this trouble, as a Sony shareholder I would think to myself, is it worth making a PS4?

depends on the following years really. Cause then we can see whether the investment in all the technology paid off or not. Time will tell

edit : welcome btw 

Halo has mainstream appeal now?

^^ Yes I´d say it does, but I think mainstream appeal is more of a marketing thing than a game thing.  Some games just don´t appeal to a big crowd of people... until you tell them it does... but Halo has all the right ingredients: Great gameplay with lots of action, great graphics (don´t give me this HD bull again you look with your eyes not you calculator) it has an epic stroy (eventhough I hate that term, way overused) and best of all a great muliplayer and co-op to bring people together. Put this together with a mege marketing mashine and you get the hype and sales we are seeing ritght now. Many games have to potential for this but only few pull it off.

On topic: YES THERE WILL BE A PS4 !!! For this not to happen the PS3 would need to really screw up and thats just not going to happen, too many peoples jobs depend on it so they will do everything they can to make it a success, no it´s not going to pull a PS2 but that doesn´t mean it can´t make any money in the long run. 

Agreed El Duderino, i think you hit the nail on the head with the fact that Halo is mainstream due to its marketing rather than the game,

We wont know whether there will be a PS4 for a few years, if trends continue as they are at the moment then there wont be, it would be to much of a financial risk to do so but i dont think the PS3 will continue at this slow pace forver. We will have to wait and see.

Hi, welcome :)

It's a bit silly people who are saying this....

OF COURSE there WILL BE A PS4, but will it be called Ps4??

n WHY will there be one??

Because PS3 hasn't stopped selling, it's still selling beleive it or not

n if BLU-RAY takes off, it's BECAUSE of the ps3

darthdevidem wrote a sentence in caps, I'm convinced! Put me in the preorders list please.

Seriously, I think they're spending too much money on this "investment" phase as they call it. The Cell was a huge investment, putting Blu-Ray in the consoles cost them a fortune, and they're now doing an European price cut 6 months after lunch... They've had so many SKUs that I'm sure they spent a lot of money on logistics and production, and they still can't ramp up production enough for the PS3's components to decrease massively in price. Software sales are low (and will continue to be low for a long time).

As a comparison, Microsoft wasted a lot of money on the Xbox. Now it's Sony's turn to do the same with the PS3... They will lose billions and billions. And as we all know, Microsoft is a much richer company, I don't think Sony can absorb the losses as gracefully as Microsoft. I doubt there would be no consequences at all... Ditching the games division completely could be too much, but at least a change of strategy will be in order. I just can't see Sony's top management being happy with having the games division sucking in all the profit from the other units! Sony's profit margin is too low for that, less than 5% in fact. MS's profit margin is more than 20%, and Microsoft's revenue is only slightly lower!

I'm looking forward to read Sony's Q2 financial report, that will give us some more info.

I don't give a shit about Blu-Ray, but yeah i believe there will be a PS4.

 no.

@gamingdevil

I mean their gamble for blu-ray would have worked if maybe not the Ps3 but at least blu-ray makes it through

that enough should help finance Ps4