And of course companies won't start investing in games for other platforms until they have the penetration to guarantee any new game will ship enough units to justify the development costs.

The move towards multimedia games means that any new game requires a vast investment in content - the game engine is no longer a significant part of the development effort - and so the recent advances in open source games development tools is unlikely to be enough to counterbalance this effect.

It's not going to change until either the fad switches to games that require less content creation (unlikely, I suspect), or some other platform gains enough market share for other reasons to justify the game development costs; and because the costs continue to increase, so does the penetration threshold required.

Hugo