Speaking to Business Week magazine, Simon Jeffrey, chief operating officer at Sega of America, damned Sony with faint praise, stating that "The PS2 probably has the capacity to sell more than any other gaming console”.

But Jeffery is not a lone voice, many analysts and leading industry executives are predicting that Sony’s magic little black box may well continue to outsell the PS3, 360 and Wii well into 2008.

According to Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities in Los Angeles, "the PS2 will have legs well into 2008… Despite all the hype surrounding the PS3, its predecessor is likely to outsell it for two more years.”

"All the media focus is on next-gen consoles and games, but a lot of the software companies will make a substantial portion of their earnings by selling [older] games," says Erik Whiteford, marketing director at California game maker 2K Sports.

By March 2007, Sony hopes to have sold a staggering 114-million PlayStation 2s worldwide. In the following year the company is likely to ship another 11 million PS2s vs. 7 million PS3s, according to research by rating agency Standard and Poor.

The Business Week piece concludes that, “Even at $130 a pop, Sony earns about $8 on each PS2 it sells, compared with an estimated loss of $250 per PS3… And Sony will rake in some $1.4 billion this year from license fees paid by game makers and sales of its own game titles for the PS2 and its predecessor, the PSOne…So it's clear Sony will want to milk the PS2 for all it's worth.”

What do you think? Has your PS2 been relegated to the cupboard under the stairs yet? Or are you, like SPOnG, still looking forward to playing a few more PS2 classics well into 2007? Such as, to take a choice example, the soon-to-be-released PAL version of Capcom's Okami (pictured).