And you’re right. If you start out using DirectX and then complain about the cost and effort to port to other platforms, that’s like grabbing a grocery store bag and talking about how impossible it would be to travel across Europe with it. Since people have no problem using higher level languages to abstract away the low-level hardware, why not use higher level libraries such as libSDL to abstract away the low-level libraries like DirectX? Suddenly your game is easily made portable to any number of platforms.

The other thing to consider is that with a little foreplanning to choose the right technologies, it’s not *that* much extra effort to ship versions for Linux/Mac, and maybe even something else. Sure, you have to choose cross-platform libraries up front, but having large parts of your code written to be portable means that if it becomes the next “World of Goo”, you will be in a great position to quickly produce more faithful console versions.

id Software seem to do a good job of this, evidenced by the fact that Doom and Quake are quickly ported (by someone else) to just about every platform that can display more than one pixel