The Reasons Behind Acquisitions

Gamasutra has an interesting article exploring why independent game developers sell their companies, and why their companies get bought.

It looks a bit deeper than the usual “woohoo, we get loads of money” assumption, there’s definitely more to being acquired than that (although it helps :-). I remember it feeling quite strange when STNC was acquired by Microsoft; very mixed - we suddenly switched from being a tiny little startup to part of the biggest software company on the planet. It validated what we were trying to do, and that we were good enough to interest the biggest players, but I was also saddened by the end of our great-startup-adventure.