Small correction...

Posted Dec 17, 2010 9:14 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica) by dlang
Parent article: Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

and of that amount spent on the windows specific code, how much savings would there be by planning for cross-platform portability to begin with vs going in after the fact and re-coding things?

90% of contemporary games are planned for "cross-platform portability". Including GTA4, of course. You should thank surprising non-ally of FOSS: SONY. It's "battered and miserable #3" in current generation of consoles, yet it still sold 41.6 million of PlayStation3 (vs "successful #2 XBox360" with 44.6 million) so game developers can not ignore it.

Yet another case where Microsoft was unable to successfully exercise it's Windows monopoly to gain monopoly in adjacent market. The initial plan was to make sure games are easily portable between XBox and Windows, but not portable to other platforms... but runways success of PlayStation2 made this plan impossibility and neck-to-neck competition between PlayStation3 and XBox360 created window-of-opportunity for cross-platfrom games... too bad Linux was unable to seize said opportunity.