Why you might not get to enjoy the PSM hack, even if you did everything right
We recently announced that YifanLu has something cooking up for the PS Vita, and it involves Playstation Mobile (PSM), Sony’s aborted experiment for indie devs on the PS Vita and Android tablets.
YifanLu was slightly fuzzy on why we should do it, but he strongly recommended everyone to register for a PSM Publisher license a few days ago. Now, that could be because Playstation Mobile rocks and everyone should try to create a game for the vita at least once in their life. Or, it could be that since PSM is shutting down soon, Yifan Lu is getting ready to release a Vita native exploit that would become useless otherwise.
If you think it’s the latter, I’d tend to agree with you.
YifanLu has released very straightforward steps on how to get up and running your own PSM games on the Vita. Sadly, one of the steps of the process requires Sony’s approval for you to become a licensed PSM publisher.

In general, getting approved for PSM can take anywhere from a couple hours to a few weeks, based on the feedback I received from people who have been approved in the past. This kind of variation implies that part of the approval process involves some sort of human verification. If such is the case, I’m pretty sure Sony employees will have a closer look at the recent surge in registration requests. In particular when these registrations are for a service scheduled to close in 2 months.
Want to know how big the surge in PSM interest is? Well, it’s easy to verify, since Sony’s official link is a bit.ly url, which provides some interesting graphsto look at (the interesting bit is the last couple days on the right):

Request for the PS Vita PSM Development assistant have been multiplied by 50 overnight, from about 20 a day to more than 1000 a day, after YifanLu’s announcement. As the news of the upcoming “surprise” makes it around the world, we could expect the requests to increase even more.
It might be a bit naive to think that Sony won’t notice something suspicious, and will keep approving PSM Publisher license keys like nothing happened. I have suggested hackers (including Yifanlu) to go with our Ninja release process in the past for similar announcements. Our ninja release process is designed exactly for that kind of scenario, to avoid raising unnecessary suspicion, but hey, your project, your choice. I can only offer my help, not force every single hacker on the scene to do the right thing
As I type this, I am still waiting for my key.