As a game studio - a developer rather than a publisher - it’s very much hand to mouth. You are paid by the publishers on delivery of milestones. Milestone reviews can sometimes be subjective. You’re basically the lowest link in the food chain and can be subject to a publisher’s whim, which can often be a bit random depending on your external producer. Keeping such a studio open in the long term is about chasing new contacts, and any gaps between contacts is expensive because you aren’t generating any income, but are having to pay wages. One or two project cancellations can easily shutter an independent developer.
In some cases studio owners may simply want out, or they might legitimately see a sale as bringing stability to the studio… Or it might just be greed. But I think it’s hard to say whether a studio would have a safer long term future being independent or being sold.
Most games, especially so called Triple A games, have too much text and NPC dialog. The last thing we need is more of this crap that the developers don’t even care about enough to write. How about we focus on making the gameplay good and not how we can fire more developers?
I’ve recently banned my kid from playing it too. I had only just unlocked it for the first time. I had previously blocked it because it was, IMHO, terrible. As a professional gamedev I find it offensively bad. But I relented, because lots of his friends were playing it. However, and this may be the experiences he was playing, it seems to be almost exclusively training kids up for gambling. Pretty much everything is dopamine based rewards. It’s like a casino. It’s worst than I ever imagined. I’m this close to banning online play in Minecraft because he is similarly gravitating to the same sort of experiences. In our case it’s not about money, he hasn’t spent a cent on these things. But the content is very problematic, I have concerns that it is encouraging developing minds that gambling is the norm.
RDR is not (officially) available on PC / Steam / Steamdeck. So you’ll need to either emulate switch or 360 via Xenia. IIRC MVG had a video about RDR running under Xenia on the deck about a year ago, and it was mostly 30fps ish.
Realistically though, if you want portable play Switch. If you want to play on a TV PS4. The best way to play this right now, in the absence of PC port, is an Xbox Series X via back compat, which doesn’t really help you!