DF owns the IP and SEGA has an exclusive to it for 5 years (ends Jan 2018). At that point, DF can do anything they want with it and SEGA stops getting the money.
It’s a typical dev/pub deal, in that the dev gets X%, but that X% is recouped from the advances (in the case of The Cave, around $3M). That doesn’t mean the game needs to make $3M, it means the devs X% made $3M. So, if the dev was getting 25%, the game would have to make $12M before the dev saw any money.
Since I am getting no backend, I have no visibility into how well the game did, or if the advance was recouped. But once the 5 year term is over, DF will gets all the money from then on. It’s not likely to be very much, but with some aggressive sales, etc, it might be.
This is where I didn’t fully understand how DF worked. Had I know this, I would have insisted on backend.