7 Days to Die is finally leaving early access, but console players will have to buy the 1.0 version again

What a shit article. There's a massive amount of context missing.

7DTD is a game created by The Fun Pimps. Telltale Games bought the rights to produce a console port of the game from TFP. Telltale Games then contracted with Iron Galaxy to produce the port. Telltale Games went bankrupt and it's assets were liquidated, one of those assets was the rights to produce the console port. TFP managed to buy back the rights to the console port, but were unable to get any of the source code for the console port. It took years to get the rights sorted out, and it wasn't cheap.

It's a messed up situation, but console players bought a Playstation 4/XBox One game from Telltale Games, a company that went bankrupt and is defunct, and that sucks. TFP is now starting from scratch to produce a console port for the current generation of consoles and that costs money.