Originally posted by Pi.Gi.:

Small Team they have made millions of dollar on this game why not hire a lot of people ?

Because it would not help, and what influence such would have would be negative. They did hire more team members not long after the game blew up; they got at least 2 coders, a full time graphic artist, and a community manager (I want to say they hired 5 people total, but I don't remember for sure). We're just now starting to see the fruits of that; it looks like the difficulty sliders are being primarily worked on by one of the "new" folks.

Just now. After having been hired back then. Consider the time frame, and understand that's a fairly standard lead-time for new hires in this sort of work. Did you* ever play that game in school/teambuilding at work, where there's a whole bunch of ropes and everybody's holding the end of two of them and you have to work together to get the knot untangled? Joining a coding project is a lot like that in the BEST of times.

A lot of folks really seriously misunderstand how the industry functions, especially in parts of the world where they actually take care of their employees and where the sweat shop conditions of the US are literally against the law.

High quality, healthy staff, fast production. You* only get to pick two. If one of those two isn't "healthy staff", you're* a selfish monster for seriously thinking your enjoyment matters more than their well being.

You COULD have all three, but then you have to add "prohibitively expensive" to the list also, and NOBODY wants them to do that. Except maybe the "I hate it when somebody else has fun" brigade who haunts this forum.

* - general you