Comment by rcxdude

I doubt that. Dev boards are often not very high margin despite their costs, but absolutely the majority of their profit is from hardware sales, not software licenses. Small volume customers are a combination of a long tail and a loss leader for a marketing pipeline, and FPGAs are almost by definition something where you can't ignore that part of the market (because you only use an FPGA if you can't use anything else and you don't have the volume/margin to justify an ASIC, so it's a niche of niches).