[jonas21]

I think it's less that they sat on their laurels and more that a team of 2 had trouble keeping up with the dozens of well-paid folks working on VSCode. Which suggests that perhaps a shareware model did not work out so well for them.

[shawabawa3]

They literally stopped developing for about 5 years, it wasn't just about the team not keeping up

[ben-schaaf]

I don't think development actually stopped. ST3 was in a quiet public beta for a long time, but you can see builds of ST3 from 2013 to 2019: https://www.sublimetext.com/3.

[Ygg2]

Why would you stop developing for 5 years?

[jon-wood]

Maybe they just wanted to do something else. Sometimes people just don't want to grind on endlessly for theoretically more money when what they've got already is enough for them.

[WD-42]

Probably to write sublime merge

[spiderice]

If they were already having trouble keeping up, then perhaps taking years off and building Sublime Merge wasn't the right strategy.