[munificent]

Every time a small successful tech company gets swallowed by a behemoth, I feel sad. Bandcamp was one of the good ones. If Panic ever gets bought, I'll straight up cry.

An ecosystem thrives by having a variety of organisms of different species and sizes interacting. The tech business ecosystem increasingly looks more like a giant pasture of uniform grass being grazed by half a dozen aging tumorous cows.

[Apocryphon]

Everyone's forgotten that monocultures are bad.

For what it's worth, Panic appears to be one of those smaller indie developers similar to say Bare Bones Software or the Omni Group. I think those are sustainable non-startup software shops that can exist and persist on their own.

[munificent]

Many companies can exist and persist on their own until a behemoth decides they shouldn't.

It's not about "can this business get enough users to be profitable?" it's about "will some huge corporation decide to put them out of business because the cost to do so is a rounding error for them?"

At any point in time, Apple could decide to ship a nice FTP client with macOS, add web language support to XCode and Panic is dust.

[Apocryphon]

Well, at least they're still making games.