If you reach a point where you can sell your IP at a number where you actually net some cash, I'd call that a "success".
In the one VC-funded failure I was closely associated with (as a true cofounder), nobody gave a shit about the physical assets.
In the last 6 months at the company, we managed to refactor the design so that the hairiest routing and group management code could get hoisted out of C++, and most CDN participant hosts could just run a tiny stub forwarder that was simple enough to be kernel-resident (a design I awesomely rejected when one of my cofounders proposed it at the start of the company).
The whole source tree was many hundreds of thousands of lines; it was cross-platform Win32 and Linux with graphical clients on each platform and IE integration. There was a lot of good stuff there. My friends Danny, Kneel, Andy, and Tim all worked on it at various times and they are, unlike me, ridiculously good.
Poof. All gone.
This is what happens when you take VC and your company fails. What's better is that by taking VC, you drastically increase your chances of failing; VCs need you to shoot the moon. Our VCs decided what we should do with all that code was to go head to head against Akamai.
You may get lucky with a very, very cool investor who gifts your IP back to you. But you're not entitled to that and you probably won't get it.
VCs aren't in the business of holding onto IP.
Is it normal they will literally force you to sell it for pennies on the dollar? I understand that it was their money, how would you handle it? Just sell it and move over to the next thing?
If you can't afford to buy the assets yourself maybe you can find a new investor to buy the assets on your behalf.
Otherwise: yes, you should just move on.
if it's a vc it's not their money (99%) and they have a fiduciary duty to their investors to get as much of their investment back as possible.
that's why...
you could always offer $1,001 of your own money to buy it personally, etc.