I'm not saying that I believe that people should make games for profit.  I'm saying that they should make awesome games because they love it and if it turns out well, they deserve to get money from it.  Content driven development: good.  Profit driven development: bad.

That's most true for hype-driven console games, where it's all front loaded and then disappears once the hype is gone. Console games also don't tend to have sale prices very often, and they disappear from store shelves due to limited space or when the number of copies pressed simply runs out (a lot of translated Japanese games just disappear because there's no copies left to buy and it's too expensive to make more, so sales are lost).

It's much less true for PC games these days, thanks to the market now being primarily digital. Games don't disappear from Steam. Sales are plentiful and can rekindle interest later (and garner huge revenue). If it takes a while for word of mouth to create an audience for a game, it doesn't matter that much anymore. A game like Recettear blew past expectations, but didn't do it in the first few days. It took some time for word to spread, and once it did then sales shot up.

It's pretty much reversed for iOS games though, because almost everything is based on word of mouth and what your friends are playing there (and reviews, and showing up in the top games lists. There's very few real franchises that get front loaded sales (Angry Birds Space being one that did), stuff like Draw Something sold continuously for weeks as more people learned about it.

Hence my fear that they might be losing money..