If they've still been struggling, even in recent months, to garner support, there is no way any system-seller games will be out by the holidays. Unless, of course, you mean the already known titles.

It'll be interesting to see how this holiday season works out.

The bulk of a game's development costs are decided by the size of the task force, how much each of those employes is being payed and the time spent creating the product. Therefor, Easier to work with = Cheaper development cycle.

http://www.shacknews.com/article/69209/vita-development-costs-closer-psp 

http://www.siliconera.com/2011/08/16/playstation-vita-devkits-cost-far-less-than-psp-and-playstation-3-kits/

Also, devs don't have to make big budget, cutting edge games for it to make something that would sell.

It is much cheaper though. $2,000 for the Vita dev kit, that's it. PS2 and PS3 were $20,000 at launch. Vita has been touted by devs for the ease of development and porting. Not knowing which devs, I heard a quote from an industry person (don't remember who) talking about the remarkably short time to development the Vita was. The makers of Oddworld praised it for being able to port over their code in under 2 weeks time and have it fully rendered. I don't remember exactly what they said but they were reallly amazed by it and hands down is cheaper than developing on PS3.

You would have to be an absolute idiot to believe this:

"Michael Denny [Worldwide Studios Europe VP] has said that development costs of a Vita game is closer to a PSP game," said Yoshida. "I wouldn't say it's the same costs as a PS3 game but when you compare to what our teams spent on Blu-ray based PS3 games it's much, much less. Part of that is that because the screen is smaller and the media is much smaller in terms of a card, so developers have to be smarter to create the asset. ... So that helps to reduce the development costs of Vita games."

Especially bold. How does having to be smarter about how you make a game translate into dev friendliness?

As for your second link, saving 13k Euros on a dev-kit isn't necessarily a big save. Once it's bought, you have it for the gen. It's not the same thing as the high costs of making a game, and even many others after that.

True words spoken.

Who would have expected a Sony console in this position back in 2006?

Sony needs to make sure AC and COD do well to both boost the system and attract other third parties. Especially western devs who shy away from handhelds. And hopefully they would have a GT and GoW cooking for it.

First off, English isn't the man's first language (or mine, but whatever). Smaller assets needed, meaning being more effecient with the assets you create. PS3 games having huge and very detailed assets vs PSV games having smaller assets that need less detail to look as good.  Bottom line though, it's less work than what a person would put into making assets for a PS3 game.

Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but there are two ways to interpret what's happening.

1) The system is capable of high end graphics and only has so much media capacity. That would be very dev unfriendly and would also support the PS360 dev cost argument, which are costly regardless of dev friendliness (because they require more resources to create the content, in general).

2) The system is not capable of high end graphics like the PS3, and as such devs need to be "smart" to create the illusion of high end graphics with not so powerful resources. This supports dev unfriendliness, but also supports it costing less in general since assets are not as detailed.

I'm not a developer but that's how I see it, which one is it?

the later