"The company has raised more than $900 million to date from Amazon, J.P. Morgan and Lightspeed Venture Partners."
That's the biggest red flag for me. General rule of thumb is that your VCs won't approve an exit unless it's for at least 10x the funding you've taken, which means they need a minimum exit of about 10 billion.
That's a tough spot to be in, and really changes your thinking. I know of at least one company that had an exit opportunity but it was only 2x funding, so the investors wouldn't allow it. They then slogged along for 8 more years until they finally had an exit that was 0.2x and it all went to the series A investors with their preference. Founders got nothing, angels got nothing, employees got nothing, and series B and beyond (the ones who blocked the 2x exit) got nothing.
Edit to clarify: I'm not saying the VCs are doing anything wrong here or being irrational or anything like that. I'm saying as a founder you need to watch out for this because the VC has a diversified portfolio and the founder doesn't.
This made me remember what happened to Maxis.
The company was founded with VC money right off the bat (Will Wright, although a central figure, wasn't the "real" founder, the investors that found him and convinced him to start the company, not the other way around).
When they release SimCity 2000, they were right on track as VC expect... the problem is that game cycle is long, they expected to release SimCity 3000 or TheSims in at least 2 years, meaning 1 year without a big release, VCs weren't happy with this, they wanted exponential growth every year, not a "staircase" growth, so the VCs kept bugging them and the result was a premature exit (where they were sold to EA for a amount of money that I think undervalued them).
Now they are mostly dead :/ (after the massive failure that was SimCity 5, almost everyone was fired, including EA CEO).
Now they are mostly dead
but a version of the original SimCity lives on at the Internet Archive - https://archive.org/details/msdos_SimCity_1989