8 years later, the devs are still surprised by how the successful the original game was
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.
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.