The console space has become increasingly more viable for small-budget indie studios with digital avenues like Xbox Live and PSN. With PS Vita, Sony hopes to rally even more support from indies, as it believes innovation will stifle if the barrier to entry is too high.

“As an industry, we have to support those smaller teams, and let them try out their ideas. Without doing so, the whole industry will stall, in terms of innovation,” SCE boss Shuhei Yoshida told Develop.

“[For PS Vita], we made it so the development kit wouldn’t be too expensive.”

“Having the capability to sell their games on the network is key to giving those smaller teams an opportunity to come up with ideas, and sometimes invest their own money to come up with something special and have their projects meet with millions of users.”

Seeing Sony throw more support towards indies comes as little surprise. Earlier this year, the firm unveiled PlayStation Suite, a cross-platform framework allowing for application delivery across Vita and Android-based mobile devices with relative ease.

Follow this author on Twitter.