Pretty interesting discussion, made me feel I want to chime in.
I find myself sympathizing with chrisjwmartin more. I did not read every post of his but at least the ones that Donald replied to.
Thing is, business is business, contract is contract, that I understand. However if we are also on the ideal side of things, speaking from passion with board games perspective, it starts to sound bad.
Like saying, you know, most board game makers don't really make that much money, but I do.
and sadly, even though I have cash sitting at home so that I don't need to work for a living, those money aren't from making fun or goko so I can't pay for your loss. Thanks for your interest in the game! Oh by the way, if you don't feel like it don't buy it. I won't force anyone.
I think, from a idealistic perspective, it is not really about how much the loss is involved and whether one should care about that or not.
There was a promise for the thing to last forever. If the company is no longer there to keep up with the promise, someone should take over. At least someone with passion should.
From a quantitative perspective also, I think Donald is certainly competitive enough to be hired as a software engineer. For a senior position say he can make 200K a year at that job. That is 50K for 3 months. Now he can give up all this money by doing an expansion that sells almost for nothing, but why can he not spare the same amount of money to reimburse those people that have bought into Goko or MF's product (discounted by the expected subscription price times number of months used?)
Not saying that is what I think should be done, but that would be the thing to do from a passion perspective, and the thing I would really appreciate as a fan.