It's actually 10 people, if the Wikipedia page is accurate. Prison Architect is developed by Introversion Software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introversion_Software
> I'm seeing several projects that make a lot of money for a little effort - DayZ comes to mind, an early access game that costs $35 and has sold millions of copies already, but still feels like a rather bad mod, with little development effort going into it (seemingly).
I would agree with you. DayZ spawned a lot of survival genre indie/kickstarted games that are all more or less broken. Even DayZ itself has taken years to add features that were present in the free mod. This might be judgmental but I think the kind of people who primarily buy these games just don't care, because I don't think they're naive enough to believe in the "everything will get better once it's out of alpha/beta" thing that gets thrown around a lot (rarely true).
Even Minecraft is pretty poor in terms of development. Performance has gotten better lately but for the longest time it used to run awfully regardless of the hardware you ran it on. Not only that but there wasn't (and I'm not sure there still is) a proper modding framework so most people just use patched jars and hack the game itself. In Minecraft's case it is understandable though, as it was basically a hobby coding project that exploded in popularity. The only thing that would have saved it from that fate is a complete rewrite, which to my understanding is exactly what Microsoft is doing with it right now since they bought it (C++ rewrite).
> I'm still on the fence about Star Citizen; the demos they've shown so far are promising, but I'm going to wait until there's an actual game.
This is just my opinion, but in my eyes it's vaporware. Too much money, too many promises, and not a lot to go by. I'm sure it might come out in some shape or form but it will never justify the hype and many will be left disappointed. /opinion