I meant more the initial marketing and community involvement that helped the game get popular in the first place. Much as it pains me to say it as a developer, code quality isn't everything...
You're right. I'm positive that every time a large company acquires a small one, it's because of their community and IP. Code is easily rewritten, and startups aren't making breakthroughs in algorithms. It's not like microsoft didn't have engineers capable of making a minecraft clone. They didn't have the rights to do so.