There are products that are very popular in niche (or not so) places, and practically no one heard of them outside. As a game developer I've seen plenty of tho

There are products that are very popular in niche (or not so) places, and practically no one heard of them outside. As a game developer I've seen plenty of those. You'll hear about them only from game developers, and other non-game developers almost never heard of them. And these are not graphics/animation/movie related - they things for managing/debugging memory/leaks/profiling/file I/O/etc. I'm not sure how well these middleware providers do, but if they are small teams (sometimes just one person), and they keep good history, and are able to make $100,000 a year - then why not, especially if you can do other things in the mean time. Here is some (probably outdated, and not full page) - http://www.gamemiddleware.org/ http://www.gamemiddleware.org/ I for one love Deja Insight - but who has heard of it? http://www.dejatools.com/dejainsight http://www.dejatools.com/dejainsight It's awesome product (not free, not open source, and not VTune/prof contentder) - but the nice GUI that it has, with tracking back makes it awesome little product that I've been using for the last 3-4 years at the studio (and only 2-3 more people, the rest of the studio doesn't know much about it - they use other things).