Which platform is that? Windows? .NET? It's perfectly possible to target both without using Visual Studio. Microsoft has somehow[0] convinced people that using VS makes their lives easier. Lots of people pay for IntelliJ too. I think the trick here is to get people hooked on languages that have a lot of boilerplate and therefore require a powerful IDE to be usable, then sell people the IDE.

[0]Based on personal conversations with individual VS users, it actually appears that VS is what many developers want or think they want, not just something forced on them by management.