I think it entirely depends on how you view Early Access. The point of Early Access is to get additional funding from interested players to pay for the rest of the game's development. Without enough money earned during Early Access, the "full" game is not going to happen. When I worked on an Early Access game, we didn't earn enough from the players buying in to finance the remainder of development, so the game was delisted and we were all either let go or transferred to other game teams.

As such, I don't think it's unethical. The developers need the money to pay for the rest of the game's development. We are not pretending the game is "complete" and the players/customers know the game won't ever be "complete" if we don't secure enough money somehow. The full scope of the content is known at the time. The risks are known at the time. Players have all of the information they need to make a fully-informed purchasing decision. If you think that the risk of the game not making it is not worth spending for, you can choose not to spend.

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Any company that wants to release a premium game console basically needs to make an enormous investment that will probably not pay off for years. There are three major requirements for this process.

First, the company must develop gaming hardware. This is generally an expensive process - building anything physical is costly, time-consuming, and is a moving target because competitors aren't stopping either. The hardware must be manufactured and factories equipped and set up for mass production.

Second, they must develop software development tools for both themselves and for external developers to use in order to build games for that console. This requires a significant internal development team to build drivers and software interfaces. Beyond this, they likely need to develop their own flagship game (or more) to launch with the console. That generally costs at least $50 million for a AAA-fidelity game and at least two years of lead time to build alongside the hardware development.

Third, they must secure investment from third party developers to build games for that console. Using that $50 million price tag for a game, we'd need at least four or five additional games to launch with in order to entice players to buy in - no one buys a game console without games to play on it. If they want four launch titles to go along with the console launch, that requires at least $200 million in investment from others.

There are only a handful of companies in the world that have the kind of money, technology, and resources needed to make such a thing happen and some of them already have game consoles. The others look at the market, at the cost of entry just to compete (not necessarily even to pull ahead), at the expected returns on investment, and it's no surprise they choose to invest their money in other opportunities that seem more likely to bear fruit.

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Honestly, there are only two requirements to avoid an acquisition:

1. The studio's controlling stakeholders/majority owners want the company to remain independent and do not want to cash out
2. The company remains financially stable enough not to need a bailout

If the studio ownership decides they want to retire or cash out, they will be open to opportunities to sell. This is usually something of an inevitability - we are human and life priorities change over time. Things might be good for a few years, but a life-changing experience like having children, the death of a loved one, or other life-altering events could easily change circumstances.

The vast majority of the time, it's because the company is already in dire financial straits and needs a bailout. If the company can't afford to keep things running, they'll either look for a bailout (typically in the form of acquisition) or they'll be forced to shut down and lay everybody off. If the company can't earn enough to pay its debts, employees, and overhead costs, it won't be in business for long.

That's really it. All acquisitions happen when either the first or the second requirement (or both) is no longer being met. Either the owners decide they want to sell or the company is in desperate need of money and must either sell or close. Many companies don't even get to secure a buyout, they often die because they can't find a buyer (or other new source of funding) and run out of money.

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There's a whole field called Marketing Analytics that is dedicated to quantifying the results and context of marketing efforts. It is rare for companies to spend a large amount of money (e.g. on marketing budgets) without some means of measuring what they get from spending it. This measurement generally includes things like impressions, click-through rates, time spent engaging with the content, google searches for the marketed material, visits to the websites, view counts, average and median watch time, and so on. There are a lot of key performance indicators that analysts will track in order to measure how effective a specific marketing tactic is, and those performance indicators get compared to the cost of the marketing tactic to determine overall cost efficiency.

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