Actually, its fairly common to buy a small company just to get the developers. Its particularly common when there is a small, cohesive team: it can cost a few hundred thousand dollars per engineer to pay the headhunter fees, signing bonuses, etc. If one can buy a small company for a few million (with suitable guarantees in the purchase agreement that key employees will stay or forfeit the gains), it works out to be cheaper to buy the company and discontinue out its products.

This obviously only works if the developers realize their existing product isn’t winning, and are willing to see it go. A long phase-out is also sometimes done.

Acquiring a company to get a single superstar developer does happen, though it is less common and there is an upper limit to the amount of cash the company would offer. Generous stock options would be thrown in as the cherry on top. Perhaps Rael Dornfest is that superstar developer, and ownership of the IP is just a nice secondary benefit.