"Throw all that hard work down tubes"?
Do consider what we are talking about here, really. A small group of programmers working for 3-4 months. This is probably somewhere around $40-60 thousand dollars.
Those are the sunk costs. Any economic analysis starts by discarding sunk costs because in the end, they don't matter. Psychologicaly they do, but when you are looking at profitability, they don't matter.
Now, we need to add the costs of finishing the project (another month? Who knows?), beta testing, marketing, distribution, etc. Then we need to come up with a figure to represent the "bad feelings" that the game may generate, as well as the support costs that come up afterwards (patches, tech support, etc.)
I don't know these numbers, chances are nobody outside the developers do. But it's not as simple as saying that the game was almost finished therefore they should have released it.
Personally, I think that ports are a bad idea. Getting a game that was a hit a year ago and then porting it to another platform invariably ends up with discrepancies in the support, having the game really be treated as a second class citizen.
Now, there's a difference with games that weren't ports, but were coded that way. For example, the games by Bungie and Blizzard. There's also Imperialism II, by SSI. Those were good cross-platform games, and didn't feel like ports.
r.