8 hours ago, métaphore said:
Of course we won't have to buy this game again after it went Gold...
Hence, TFP perfectly know that: we already bought it and we won't pay again (the vast majority of us), even to support them out of sheer love.
That's the point. Because we are not going to buy the Gold version again, we'll also not be their targeted customers for Gold. What TFP would have studied, in order to cover their investment, are all those other people who still didn't buy it after more than a decade on the market. In fact, it might represent quite a different population and a new business model (my assumption).
The question we don't know the answer is would a Gold edtion of Seven Days to Die be rather bought at $60 or $40 by [insert the min number of sale required] of new people - or would it rather be successful as a barely Free to Play version with in game monetization?
What I've spent on hardware, only for running 7D2D, was mentioned to underline how cheap the software is compared to hardware upgrade. Since I've bought 7D2D, I've added no more than a dozen games to my library and, put together, it's probably less than 0.5% of the money I've spent to run them with my gaming set in the mean time.
And out of this software money, only a fraction is actually going to the Publishers. Unity and Valve would be taking a good share of TFP sales. Hence, even if they had sold 15 millions copies over a decade - an impressive number nonetheless, they probably would not cash, in average, a very large amount per unit. In fact, their strategy would be based on their actual level of sales and projection for the future rather than what they have sold in the past. Making game content is certainly a very expensive business but I agree that they have been, so far, quite successful at it.
When (if) they release an updated console version in the close future, I guess that we'll have a better understanding at what they are aiming for the gold version of this game.
15 million copies would be even after steams cut somewhere about or over 50 million. TFP did only grow slowly and is now at 50 people(?), but the biggest growth seems to have happened in the last few years, so as a crude estimate we could assume an average of 30. At 100k expense per employee per year they should still have a few millions left. Though some of that may have been already invested in getting developers for a second team that is developing a future income source (I don't know if that team is already included in the 50 people mentioned above or not).
And the release of the console version happening presumably in less than a year should get them new money.
I don't know if they have investors, but it is entirely possible from the numbers that they are still fully independent and with a cash reserve. And they seem to have a lot of options besides getting whales or doing microtransactions even if that were possible.