I agree with you that they most likely needed the money to do what they wanted to do at that scale.
But I think my point still stands. Because it is a deal with the devil in the most literal sense that is possible. You get to your goal faster, easier or at all but in the end you have to ask yourself if the price you paid for that was worth it when the devil comes collecting. That is the moral of the fictional Storys, isn’t it?
But to add to this. I think we, as consumers, aren’t completely innocent either. Buying only the best looking, 1000 hours, other buzzword games. This undeniably sends a message to indie devs which can lead to people making self harming decisions.
One could argue that we got groomed to want that. And I do. All those blockbuster-games that were made under gruesome conditions are unsustainable. But we didn’t knew that. We thought that they were the new normal.
But now we know better. This is just normal if you walk over corpses to get to your goal. And if we want developers that value our time and mental health, then we should value developers time and mental health in return.
Which means showing them that we will buy games that are not those 10 million dollar productions. And that we will measure the quality of the game compared to the resources that went into that particular game and not compared to a game that had an unholy amount of resources to burn through.
In the end we need to find a way to cut out all the rich people who came into the gaming industry as it broke into mainstream, who are throwing their weight/money around and bully everybody into submission.
And that needs strength of character. It means not buying the new shiny thing that we have seen an add for the hundredth time today, no matter how much we want that. It means not taking that deal which will make that problem go away quicker.
If gaming has taught us anything, it is how to prevail against overwhelming forces. That it takes compassion, companionship, a bit of anger and sacrifices.
If we haven’t learned that, why the fuck are we even playing.