The manufacturer's problem needs more capital, because it is also solved through diversification. If the total market for space oscillators is 120,000 a year, with about a 2-3% annual growth, making the best space oscillators has a cap. You'll need to figure out how to turn your expertise in space oscillators into neighboring products - space modulators and electromagnetic oscillators, perhaps - each of which is an R&D investment itself.
Perhaps in a textbook economy, yes; but in the U.S. economy that Massdrop operated in, continued sales of products hinged upon wages being available to spend on optional desires. That economics assumption has not held: most people’s inflation-adjusted pay decreased over Massdrop’s lifetime while the inflation-adjusted costs of necessary goods increased (thanks, enshittification and shrinkflation!), and so their potential customer pool would have been steadily draining throughout their operating years. The private equity model of ‘diversify to generate horizontal revenue’ only functions in a wages-dropping economy for retailers selling necessary goods, such as Walmart; for Massdrop, whose goods are exclusively non-essential, they had little chance to survive by increasing product diversity. (And effectively none whatsoever, considering how small their niche was to begin with!)
If it's now a glorified Amazon, who cares?
So not sure if that was really the issue, people ordered keycaps because they liked the design, e.g. the Dasher MT3 set was super popular due to a similar one being used in the "Severance" show.
If you think about it, keycaps makes sense strategically. They're cheap and small enough for hoarding, with a wide range of easy customization, with all sorts of trends that could be capitalized on for seasonal/repeat customers, they also last basically forever and are light so it's dirt cheap to ship. All for probably 90%+ profit margin.
Why grind away at heavy, expensive, complex, fragile, or specialized hardware for thin margins when you can ship colorful plastic at high markup? Sell the disposable personalized accessories to the hardware: keycaps, cases, dongles, cables, straps!
Well, customers like you wise up and cut out the middleman and buy straight from the source. If there's a profit to be made for those things, almost anyone can make those things for niche sized demand.
Seems like Corsair is taking it one step further, why even have a quality/niche hardware base? Just do trendy accessories or modifications to commodity hardware.