When developers first came to grips with the PS3, many were overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of Sony’s framework, notably the multithreaded Cell processor and taking advantage of SPUs. While Sony has since addressed many dev concerns over the PS3, with Vita, this steep learning curve is something Sony aimed to do away with from the very start.

Sony-owned partner SN Systems, which handle much of the R&D work on Sony’s internal development tools, says Vita tools will make game development ‘as easy as possible.’ And so far, early feedback from developers is glowing.

“This time around we have thought about how developers pick it up and how they get started,” SN Systems director Andy Beveridge told Develop.

VP of development, Bernard James, added “this time we built our debugger into Visual Studio. We’d been asked for it for a long time, and we did take careful consideration over the decision. The previous debuggers were made without Visual Studio, but they provided additional features that Visual Studio didn’t. It was a tough decision when we made it, but the feedback we’re getting from NGP developers today has told us that it was the right decision.”

More accessible dev tools sounds like the right approach. Hopefully this translates into more third party support — and from what we’ve seen of the Vita’s launch lineup, it’s already got a strong backing.

Follow this author on Twitter.