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.