Is 2009 truly going to be the year of the PSP? What about the PS3? Yeah, for sure, the software line-up's more than great - LBP PSP? Uncharted 2? take your pick! (ooh, and that new Jak & Daxter for the PSP too!) - but will it be enough to drive hardware sales for the console and handheld?

Well, damn right, it should!

PSP brand manager John Koller is optimistic that hardware sales for 2009 could see as much as a 15% increase for both the PSP and PS3 - and that's seeing things from a global perspective: that's North America, Europe, Japan, and all other regions.

Sony still hasn't revealed their fiscal-2008 report yet (should be any day now), but we're assuming it's got some pretty huge sales figures. Talking to VG247, Koller admits:

We’ve been very bullish on PSP. We had our largest sales year ever last year, and we’d look to go about 10-15 percent north of that this year. It’s for a number of reasons, but primarily because of the entertainment packs and line-up of software that’s coming. The software line-up alone should drive a lot of hardware sales.

For PS3 I’ll stay general as well, but we also had our best sales year for PS3 last year and we’ll look to go north of that by a similar percentage. That’s being driven by, in a lot of ways, by our first-party software line-up, which is outstanding, but there’s some third-party titles coming. The line-up’s very strong. What I mentioned there was North America-focused, but you could probably extrapolate that globally as well.

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• Sony says PSP may surpass this year's sales forecast by 1-million