When animated themes, known officially as Dynamic themes, for the PlayStation 3 Cross Media Bar (XMB) were announced, the burning question was if consumers were going to be allowed to create their own animated themes and, of course, if there were going to be themes available for free.
Unfortunately, the ability to create Dynamic themes has been granted exclusively to licensed developers who possess PlayStation 3 development kits. As confirmed by Grace Chen on the PS Blog:
“Dynamic themes require a dev kit, so only for licensed developers.”
We speculate that the reasons for this decision are attributed to the risks involved in giving consumers access to proprietary software and animation formats involved in making such themes as well as legal issues involving the content that the community will undoubtedly churn out (you know who you are and what we’re talking about).
However, this was originally the case when the PSP and PS3 were released in the first place. That said, there could be a future update to the situation that grants gamers the ability to create their own themes.
[Source]
