Sony’s Jim Ryan has said it would be “undesirable” to give its competition too big a head start when it comes to the next generation of consoles.

During a chat with Eurogamer, the SCEE boss said: “I think we would consider it undesirable to be significantly later than the competition [with the next PlayStation].”

Nintendo will launch its Wii U hardware sometime next year, and reports running claim Microsoft is set to unveil the next Xbox – said to be codenamed ‘TEN’ – at CES 2012 in January. If that all pans out, we may be seeing the PlayStation 3’s successor sometime next year.

For now though, we’re guessing Sony’s main focus is the forthcoming launch of its PlayStation Vita handheld.