Sure, I can provide that. I'm the current CEO.
Now, I have to caveat that I really only have the insider story from Jan 1, 2010 until today. Prior to that, I was a community member so there's a lot of speculation in my opinions.
From my side of the screen, GarageGames has been a company who has always just survived. In the early days, there was less competition and the indie market was much easier to please since there weren't a lot of options. What community members saw on the outside as a pump and dump mentality, was GarageGames' pursuit to build tech that drive the revenue that would sustain the company. What ended up happening, is that GG took a bite from the poison apple, branched the engines, and build many products -more than we could really support.
The company achieved sustainability through paying below average salaries. Granted, the company at the time was a self-proclaimed lifestyle company, and it really lived up to that mantra. An early employee told me that the people that worked at GarageGames were the people they couldn't chase away.
The company was sold in 2008. And there's no much to say other than the fact that a new digital distribution platform business was built inside of GarageGames. A lot of the talent moved from the engine business to that new business and the engine team suffered. The new owners were trying to build a billion dollar business and the game engine business isn't one...so the tech and tools became a red headed stepchild (by the way, I don't blame the large corporate owners at the time, that's why they bought the business).
During that time, we pursued very aggressive development. Possibly too aggressive. Expectations were set really high (along with a major price increase) and the tech and tools business moved ahead. Ultimately, I don't think the resources were available to meet their goals. The launch was initially very successful, but many customers felt that the engine was not up to the level they expected...especially since they felt abandoned by the end of engineering of the previous engine.
Two months before I started working here, Epic pulled the rug from under our feet by (essentially) giving away their products to the market we made our money off of. Like a sports club, we made the majority of our money through people failing at the product we provided (not a good business model). Now, UDK open a gym where you could fail for free. Unity followed. The low price engine market died...2 years ago...it's dead....forever.
Since then, we've been working to reinvent ourselves still. We split the company into two. The first half focused on our existing tech, the second half started working on an engine that would consolidate our tools into one code base that was mobile focused. Ultimately, we didn't have enough money to pursue that.
We needed a new direction. We decided to move our products to open source and pursue contract service work while we build tech on top of our code base (Google does this a lot too). By going open source, we cultivate potential customers of that service business. Even though we launched the open source engine in September, the contract service work started a year before that. We are currently under contract with several large (like Fortune 100 sized companies) and we are in contract negotiations with others. It's still going to take a lot of time to build the service business, but so far so good. Bellies are full and employees are paid fairly.
As for company philosophy, I think we've found that our most important value is humility. We openly embrace each other's weakness and we help each other. We prefer to employ a humble beginner developer who is looking to learn over the arrogant veteran. Everyone here is happy with the biggest exception being that we want more stability so that we can continue to do what we love.
