John Kodera, the man in charge of Sony's PlayStation business, just dropped two cryptic hints about the PlayStation 5, as recorded by WSJ reporter Takashi Mochizuki.

Here they are:

It's easy enough to connect the dots. If March 2021 is when Sony expects the PlayStation business to start growing again, and the existing PlayStation 4 is on the way out... we should see the PlayStation 5 in March 2021, right? 

That's one way to interpret it, sure -- and it lines up with previous industry speculation that a PlayStation 5 wouldn't arrive until 2020 at the earliest. (The PS4 was introduced in Nov. 2013, so it'd be pretty old by console standards in 2021.) 

But there's another possibility: Sony might take this opportunity to wean us off traditional game consoles entirely. Bloomberg reports that Sony's new direction is less about gadgets and more about subscription services. And Sony just so happens to have a subscription service that can stream PlayStation games to people who don't have a console at all. It's called PlayStation Now.

While game streaming generally requires users to have a pretty solid internet connection, the bar isn't nearly as high today as it was when PlayStation Now was first introduced in 2014, and it might seem very low indeed compared to the internet connections available in 2021. 

Sure, Sony could still release a traditional PlayStation 5 console. But don't be surprised if they don't -- or if the PS5 is simply a tiny box that streams games from the cloud.

Sony didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.