Falling sales of PlayStation 2 hardware and software and a weakness in the local currency has lead to Sony's games division turning a loss for the year to March 2009 - and the picture isn't going to be any brighter for 2010 according to its latest earnings report (read the whole thing here).

The games division of the company - which declared its first net loss in 14 years - saw increased sales of the PS3 but the slow death of the PS2 is hurting it; and PSP software sales were also down year-on-year.

March 31st 2009 to March 31st is also going to contain pain. For the games division, the company says, "A decline in sales is predicted to due to negative impact from the appreciation of the yen and the decrease in sales of the PS2 business. We anticipate that the Game business will continue to record a loss due to the negative impact from the appreciation of the yen and a further decrease in sales of PS2 business despite our expectation that the profitability of the PS3 business will improve due to hardware cost reduction and an enhanced line-up of software titles."

The phrase, "the profitability of the PS3 business will improve" sounds so much more encouraging than "the lack of profitability will decrease".

Better get that enhanced line-up of software titles moving then.

The figures:

Hardware Year to March 31st 2009
PS2 - down 5.75 units to 7.91 million year-on-year.
PS3 - up 0.94m to 10.6 million y-o-y.
PSP - up .30m to 14.11 million y-o-y.

Software Year to March 31st 2009
PS2 - down 70.5m units to 83.5m.
PS3 - up 45.8m units to 103.7m.
PSP - down 5.2m to 50.3m.