Now maybe I'm missing something and I'm talking nonsense, but doesn't construct have almost 2 million paying users?
We don't know how many gamedev subs they have exactly but based on several infos we can estimate : in 2022, Scirra revenues were 100k/month (probably bigger now), approx 50% of their revenue are indiedevs/hobbyists and 50% is from education/school, the sub price varies a lot between regions. US/EU is 100-200 dollars per year but some other countries pay much lower price
I would very roughly estimate the number of individual/gamedevs subscribers to be approx 10k (not counting Education licence : there are probably even more children/students using C3 than hobbyist/indie but the licence is very different - it's one big entity paying for many students)
if we consider 1.2M revenu per year, 50% rev from gamedevs subscribers and approx 70$ paid per year for each gamedev subscriber, it gives 8571 gamedevs subs. But it's hard to estimate how much is paying a sub on average, if most users are from EU/US then there is less subsribers like 5K, if more users are from other countries then it's more subscribers like 20K.
I would say none of this above is our business but they definitely COULD hire 3 additional devs, but Scirra probably think it wouldn't be worthwhile for them. It would lower the profit of the founders or make their position more risky because they could not afford losing a big Education client or losing 30% of their userbase for Godot etc.
Hiring at least 1 additional dev is long overdue though, based on subscription price increases or Construct Animate which was supposed to help Scirra to hire additional workforce so it benefits gamedev users in the end even if it's targeting a different audience etc.
(Edit : to answer UltraLion below ↓, I don't think the numbers of the frontpage are meaningful, any account created automatically follows Ashley, so it looks like there is approx 1.2M accounts ever created for Construct, but most of them never paid a sub, also 60K exported games per month doesn't mean 60K different games are released but just the button "Export" is pressed 60K times per month, an export can just be a test to check if it works, a student exporting their homework, an alpha, a bugfix release etc. Those are mostly marketing tricks)
They do have limited resources (only 2 devs working on the engine) which is why I don't think it's a good idea if we depend on them for every single thing and if they limit the expandability of the engine and what 3rd party devs can achieve. Because we know a lot of popular feature request are sleeping for 5+ years, while some of them are created pretty easily by addondev thanks to SDK1. Even if Scirra had 20 fulltime devs, it wouldn't be a great idea to limit the expandability, the industry standard is to give users the power to do what they want, not to lock/hide/break everything on purpose