Will Playstation Vita be Developer Friendly?

Playstation Vita, also named PS Vita, is Sony's latest portable game console that got gamers worldwide excited about. Other than its features and super realistic graphics that will blow your mind, there's also a chance that PS Vita will be developer friendly. This comes as quite a surprise since Sony has been known to combat the use of homebrew games and applications on its device in attempt to prevent users from running ISO and CSO (in other words, pirated) games on its consoles. Homebrew games and applications have so far only able to be run on PS Vita's predecessor, all Sony PSP consoles, if a user has a custom firmware instead of Sony's official firmware.

There are a few different custom firmwares out there, namely M33, GEN, prometheus, and a few others, developed by Sony PSP independent hackers and developers. Having these custom firmwares as your system also means your PSP's are no longer eligible for warranty and protection from Sony. Sony has been known not to really like the use of custom firmware on their Sony PSP, and even at one point conducted a survey asking its users 'why' do they hack their PSP or run a custom firmware (also known as CFW) on their PSP's. For later models of Sony PSP, namely PSP 3000 and PSP Go, Sony has been putting extra efforts to prevent these version of consoles from being able to run homebrew games and apps, or hacked in any way. However, independent hackers and developers developed a workaround to this problem, which is HEN or chickHEN, where even if users cannot switch their firmware to custom firmwares, they're able to play ISO and CSO games, which can be found everywhere online for free, on their PSP.

In July 2011, during Develop Conference in Brighton, the Head of Developer Services of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe talked about PS Vita hardware, and also about various software development tools and technologies. When asked about homebrew capability of PS Vita, Sony replied that they would be disclosing more information regarding that very soon. This probably hints that PS Vita might be developer friendly, something that most people have been waiting to hear from Sony.