> Is anyone else skeptical that they can motivate publishers to spend time/money porting their games to the Linux platform?
no.
porting and refactoring tools are so good now you can even port a direct3d app to opengl in 2 days or less, you could use a d3d>opengl wrapper in a day of work.
libraries are also so good at dual platform it requires minimal changes (usually just a new build system).. afaik the biggest change is handling input (theres no directInput on linux - most games use directInput for mouse/kb).
theres also numerous benefits to a closed system economy like an app store - for example even if nobody uses it you are practically exclusive and will get more buys than other places you can sell your app.
I would merely make the point that if porting was as painfully simple as you suggest here, non-first-party publishers would be making their games available for every platform (in most cases) without a second thought.
Even though multi-plat development is infinitely easier today than it was even 5 years ago, I still think getting titles onto multiple platforms is much harder and time consuming than you are giving it credit.
no.
porting and refactoring tools are so good now you can even port a direct3d app to opengl in 2 days or less, you could use a d3d>opengl wrapper in a day of work.
libraries are also so good at dual platform it requires minimal changes (usually just a new build system).. afaik the biggest change is handling input (theres no directInput on linux - most games use directInput for mouse/kb).
theres also numerous benefits to a closed system economy like an app store - for example even if nobody uses it you are practically exclusive and will get more buys than other places you can sell your app.