So basically whenever a gamestudio gets sold or turned into stock, the creator at the top get a shit-ton of money but Wall Street winds up raping the studio to death in a misguided attempt to shake/save money out of it that inevitably fails and only winds up gutting the gaming studio and turning it into a shadow of its former self.
Since it wasn't the "Wall Street" boogie monster that bought out Sierra, I'm not sure that it always happens the way you've described it in your "Occupy Wall Street" description above. Sierra did pretty well as a publicly traded company. The problem with going "public" is that once you start using other people's money, they tend to want to have a say in how their investment is handled. This opened the door to what eventually happened.
And remember: LucasArts wasn't bought out by anyone; it just hadn't produced anything of note in years. Its downfall appears to have been due to revolving mis-management with no clear direction.
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In the 1990s, companies were flush with cash and had to do something with it, so they bought other companies and bought marketshare. Sierra themselves bought several companies during that time -- Dynamix, Coktel, Papyrus, etc. And it wasn't just the software industry; in my field -- plastics -- companies merged, were bought out or went out of business there, too.
However, not every acquisition fits with the core business of the parent company, so they don't always know how to properly manage what they'd bought or don't understand how that particular business works. Mismanagement isn't always intentional -- very seldom do people buy a company to intentionally drive it into the ground; unless you are getting rid of a rival, it's a terrible waste of money and resources. Remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Add to that -- as Collector mentioned above -- there appeared to be some shenanigans going on in the forced Sierra buy-out and the CUC affair was a scam of some sort. I've even seen some posts on other forums theorizing conspiratorally that it _WAS_ all part of a take-down from the other much-smaller rival software companies at the time that now dominate today's marketplace... No one wastes their time and energy to take out a pawn; they aim for the king, and Sierra was (a) king at the time.
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But let's not romanticize it too much here: Sierra and LucasArts were companies, and the purpose of a company is to make money; it's always a gamble: will people buy what they make? If some great things also come out of it -- as they did for both companies -- then we're all the better for it.
