Last Post (in Months) is how long ago their last post was. My guess is that the company is on vacation this month (or are considering some issue). Mitch is by far the most helpful person in the runtimes section. Sheado has the box2d answers you are looking for, but hasn't made a post in 3 1/2 months. BinaryCats can tell you why the line doesn't work. Heck, I can tell you exactly what that line means and why it doesn't work for Cocos2d-x, but I digress...
Your problem aside, now I'm wondering what exactly are the conversion metrics? I mean, you intend to buy Spine, but your determination (utility function) is hinged on a specific feature. How many people come to look at Spine, ask a few questions, and then never buy?
Without sales data, my guess would be between 3-4 questions before purchase. Lots of people ask a question or two, never get answered and storm off. Then there are guys like this who bought 5 licenses without a single question.
The combined haul of the first 2 kickstarters was 105K. After taxes and fees, I'm betting that amount is closer to 65K. At a burn rate of 2500/month I'd say that's roughly 26 months or 2 years and 2 months. The first kickstarter was in Feb 2013, so really that target estimate of depletion is around April 2015.
Now, the kickstarter is not the only source of income. Heck, I bought a license and then backed the second kickstarter. There have obviously been sales since.
Assuming that you want to sustain a burn rate of $2k/month (after tax), how many sales do you need?
For Spine Essential @ $89, you need 28 sales per month. Assuming 5 questions before purchase that's $13/question needing 140 questions answered per month. Nate answers questions @ around 6/day, and the other 3 top posters answer around 2 per day. By himself, Nate would need the whole month to answer posts. The top 3 contributors combined cut Nate's work in half!
For Spine Pro, you only need 9 sales per month. Professional users tend to ask fewer questions. Let's say they ask an median of 3 questions before a sale. That's $96/question needing 26 questions per month answered.
80% less work for the same money. Pareto principle.
Spine Enterprise would only need 3 sales every 2 months. Those customers could email Nate directly and ask for whatever feature they wanted. I personally would send them my phone number and answer their questions in person.
From my perspective, Essential users tend to use free game engines and professionals use either something proprietary (which probably means they wrote it themselves) or they have converted to Unity. The proprietary guys are smart enough to write a game engine and are smart enough to answer any of their own questions. Thanks to guys like Mitch, Unity just works.
So what is the strategy here?
Essential licenses are what I call long tail sales. There are more of them, but they don't quite pack the punch that Professional Licenses do. However, places like Amazon.com have made entire businesses out of long tails. The trick to long tail sales is to create a self perpetuating community (e.g. stack overflow) that operates on social currency (e.g. stack overflow) to answer the majority of small questions and act as your sales team. If my sales data said the people buying weren't strongly correlated with the people asking questions then I'd probably lock forum posting down to licensed only.
What if you cut essential licenses? I don't know the sales data, but it's possible to simply drop the essential license and cull out the people who ask many questions and who don't buy. Price them out. This would be a good strategy leading up to to another kickstarter campaign as you could offer professional licenses @ $145 (50% off). This alone gives a transactional utility.
Dropping essential also means retiring support for free engines. One could simply maintain and update language runtimes (and Unity) instead of every engine on the face of the planet. If you use a free engine, you are less likely to buy professional license (or are smart enough to write your own interface).
What would I do?
Hire Mitch give him the difference between professional license and unity license. Fire essential give it the boot. Raise the price of Unity integration. Drop support for all engines, only support language runtimes { C, C#, Java }. Run a kickstarter for $15K with goals such that $145 gives you professional, $100 gives you educational and $289 gives you professional + unity. Like a giant sales groupon.
After kickstarter, lock down forum post privileges to paid only. Make a landing page that most questions are already answered, just do a search.
Why? Use the Pareto principle to figure out what 20% of your effort is giving you %80 of the money and grow that part of your business to make up the difference. Also, at some point Spine will be 'finished' and needs to be set on a back burner to pursue the next venture.
Too Evil?
The other thing I would consider is to stop all production of Spine and leave it to generate a slow monthly income without any further involvement. In that case I would probably shutdown the forums and turn them into a knowledge base and move all future questions to stack overflow.
BYOB (Bring your own brain).
Why? Diminishing returns.
