Usually when it's a single owner, it's a smaller indie studio. And I've known a number of people who have worked in indie studios across the years, from multiple countries/continents. Primarily in mobile and PC (including old platforms like Facebook). While I'm sure there are ethical owners out there, the stories that I generally hear are the bad ones, and they are all kind of the same.
If you're the owner, you hire a bunch of people, hopefully you get lucky by picking up someone with a great aptitude for management combined with expertise on the engineering side--making sure they have a relative expertise on versioning software, device knowledge, and all the other software tools necessary for game development. Shopping for design lead, QA lead, an art lead, and a director is much easier, as there are many more people with those skillsets out there. Pay them for one thing, but give them a whole lot of other tasks outside the job description - like getting your QA to do XML scripting, tell them it's job experience even though they only get minimal raises and maybe a BS promotion that's really just a title change to go along with their usual minimal raise. Then, if you're A. successful, and B. Don't get involved in some multi-million dollar lawsuit with a publisher/platform owner/engine owner, you get sell the studio to a larger publisher first chance you get, walk away with your millions.
Or at least, that would be my guess :)
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
