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[Umbran]

Originally Posted by Mallus

and really, it's not that hard to get code written for one machine to work on another (though getting it to run well is another story).

First of all, yes, getting code to run cross-platform can be a big issue, depending on what technologies you've used. But, even if it wasn't - you yourself note that getting it to run well is another story. But you can't go shipping a game that doesn't run well. That "other story" is inescapable.

Of course multi-platform development adds to your costs, just not as significantly as you're indicating, particularly, which, curiously enough, helps explain the trend towards multi-platform development. If multi-platform development was profitable, why do it? Charity?

How costly cross-platform development is depends upon the technologies you are using.

Also, note that the question of it being profitable is complicated. For example, there's the question of resources - how many people that you don't currently have will you need to get on the staff? How quickly can you get them, and are they good enough? Can you cover the extra overhead they represent for the short term to reap the long-term costs?...

And, it is not enough to make a profit. You have to make a big enough profit. The bigwigs compare their investments. I can spend $X on cross-platform development, and that'll earn me $Y. I could spend that $X on seventeen other projects, each of which will make some other amount. If that other amount is larger than $Y, I probably don't do the cross-platform development.

If I recall correctly, Macs currently have something like a 10% to 13% share of the overall home computer market, depending whose estimates you read. That means that if you have a windows-app that you want to take cross-platform, if the extra development cost is not less than 10% of your total development costs, it probably isn't economically worth porting.