Generally that’s true but there are outliers. Valve for example continues to rake it in while not turning immensely shitty. (Not saying they aren’t without issue, but they are vastly better than many others in the industry)

Similarly, the route that Hello Games took. They started off with an unfinished product rushed to market, but took the money made and invested back into NMS, continuing to release big free expansions to this day.

I think a big part is “don’t go public.” As soon as you go public, your dedication is no longer to your product / your customers, but to quarterly growth / gains for shareholders

For most small companies that break big, they want to use the new resource to make more stuff, because most of these types of companies are in creative industries. Then when those things aren't also breakout successes, they get saddled with extra staff and costs and spend up in the machine.

I mean generally I think it's cause the people who start these more creative focused companies like video games have a bunch of things they want to do but can't because of money. But when they get lots of money suddenly they're able to do all these cool ideas and hire the staff to make them happy. Then just naturally as companies get bigger they become harder to manage and the CEO who probably was just wanting to do creative stuff now is managing stuff instead so a new CEO comes in and that's when things start to become more profit focused and start to go bad. Or just when the original owners get greedy and take it public to try and make even more money.

It seems like a company could simply not let itself be transformed, but it never happens.

The developer of Minecraft did this. Later, he eventually sold it to Microsoft for like $2 Billion, if I recall correctly.