Ease Of Development Has Been One Of Sony's Banner Bullet-Points Throughout The Announcement Of PlayStation Vita.

That's according to a number of Sony executives quoted by Develop. Sony's thrown-out its old ambition for complicated architecture, and replaced the philosophy with a development environment that's easy for big and small studios to produce content for.

“In a sense, [PlayStation father Ken] Kutaragi was enjoying challenging game developers,” revealed new WorldWide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida.

“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.”

Yoshida wasn't the only senior Sony executive keen on emphasising the simplistic development environment of the PlayStation Vita however.

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

“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.

“In terms of performance, and the graphics power and programmable shaders and so on, what you can get out of it is far closer to PS3. It’s a great contrast of ease of development to the output you get from the system.”

Of course, simpler development is a net win for us as consumers too. It will mean studios can more quickly and efficiently realise their ideas, hopefully resulting in more content to keep us engaged.

[source develop-online.net]