The CEO stated, "We were completely caught off guard by the game's success, and we did not anticipate the success in the sense that it was never meant to be such a long-term commitment."
This entire article is just bullshit. Even the title is wrong. It weren't the devs...it was the ceo.
The CEO represents the company that developed the game. And in this context, dev = the company that developed the game. So yeah, it's the dev [company] talking about stuff.
Wrong.
Colossal Order was a company of 13 people when Cities Skylines was released. It's not like there is an out of touch CEO somewhere above 7 levels of management who has no clue what's going on with the people actually developing the game.
Do you really think a ceo has the same opinion like it's employees?
As rikudou said, in the context of "The dev of X never anticipated this success and it being a long-term project even after release", the dev is the company. And for the company, the CEO is the one who has to have a plan about the success of their projects and the future commitment to old products.
And as I said, in such a small company the CEO is not someone crunching numbers, restructuring departments and having meetings with partners all over the world all day. They are pretty much one of the dev team.
Dev as in ”Company doing the development”. Not the company that does the publishing. Not the developer who writes code. Represented by the company CEO