You also gave Larian a fiscal reason. The game was in development for 6 years and was funded by Larian and the early access sales. They have every incentive to release a game 'good enough' upon running out of money.
I can find no indicators that suggest Larian was running out of money. If you look at the yearly revenue against the budget for the development of the game, they had plenty of cash on hand through 2023 - even before the sale of Bg3 they had 12 Million in revenue plus easy access to streams of credit if they needed it, plus the extra money from EA sales, plus a warchest from DOS2 that they came into development with (around $400 million or so).
Oh and another chunk from the Tencent deal, but I don't know how much that was. Although they didn't allow that stake to be sold for cash as much as access to China.
Revenue is not profit. 12 mil per year for 6 years is 72 million which is a 28 million deficit against a conservative 100 mill game budget not including marketing if we assume pure profit, which is not how that works. Do you have a source for the 400 million number?
4) I will correct an assumption. Larian does not have to be broke and begging for their to be financial reasons in releasing a game early. They moved up the date of release to avoid Starfield. That is an early release for financial reasons alone. You can still release a game early due to running out of money, but not have to take on debt because you responsibly projected development costs and released early so you would not have to do that. Lack of debt or closing studios and finances running too low to keep BG3 in the oven for 6 more months to a year are not mutually exclusive.
Most recent estimates put the number sold of DOS2 at 7.5 million copies - across all platforms - which would put it at around 450 Million total revenue. Again we don't have exact estimates - nobody does because this is a private company and they don't have to report to investors.
The high revenue stream over the years makes sense if you look at how staggered the platform releases were for DOS2. See below:
Windows - 14 September 2017 - 1 Million copies in 2 months. PlayStation 4, Xbox One - 31 August 2018 macOS -31 January 2019 Nintendo Switch 4 September 2019 iPadOS - 18 May 2021
So we have to go with how Swen reports in interviews, and this one from two months ago he said that DOS2 sold 3 x as many copies as DOS1. It would be great if they released these numbers though.
There is also the TenCent deal which brought in a large amount of money for them as well - although again i cannot speculate on what TenCent paid for the 30% ownership stake to get a seat on the board. It was probably quite a lot.
Did Larian make a statement saying they were adjusting their release date to get in front of Starfield? I understand that is what people assumed but I can't see a good reason for them to have done that. The teams exhausted themselves to try to hit that date with a decently playable build. Understanding what was going on financially at Hasbro seems to me to make more logical sense - but again this counts as speculation to a certain extent.
