Does the Increment needs to be releasable

Hello,

I have a question concerning the increment at the end of the Sprint.

In today’s retrospective the Product Owner asked if we really always need a potentially releasable increment at the end of the Sprint even if we absolutely know that we will not release in the next months. He thinks we could the time needed to make the tool releasable.

In my opinion the increment needs to be releasable at the end of every Sprint because I don’t want to have Backlog Items like “release version” or even worse, have a complete release Sprint.