Vita to be Sony's "easiest" and best supported platform for devs

Sony has learned from its experience with the development-unfriendly PlayStation 3, and made the Vita as accessible as possible.

“When it comes to ease of development, the Vita is a platform with which we’ve been very mindful of that,” SCE Worldwide Studios senior VP Michael Denny told Develop.

“In terms of smoothing the development process, certainly what the Vita offers is close to that of the PSP, and with some of the help we’re giving to developers, I would say it is the easiest and most well supported platform yet."

Colleague Richard Lee concurred, adding that there has "never been anything like this on a PlayStation platform".

“We made every effort to make it as easy as possible,” he said.

“I think we took the experiences from PS3, and decided that we wanted to go out there with a great developer environment that is compatible with the third party tools that developers normally use."

Developer support is a hot issue for Sony because its flagship platform, the PS3, is notoriously difficult to develop for, with most studios relying on third-party technologies to build games for the system.

"It had very, very high potential and peak performance, but programming for the PlayStation platforms was a huge challenge for game developers," SCE Worldwide Studios lead Shuhei Yoshida commented.

“In a sense, Kutaragi was enjoying challenging game developers. He was especially challenging the top programmers in the world to come up with something amazing to make use of the performance of each iteration of the PlayStation platforms.

“That was very good – it was great – for the teams with engineers who liked the challenge, but the world has now changed, and today there is a much larger community of developers.

“The focus has shifted to be less about getting the most out of the hardware, to be about having a very smooth production process. That’s because now it involves so many more people to make one game.”