I might argue that 6 years isn’t a tremendous amount of time for a company. Given those failures, it could be that it’s still better for the publisher to stop paying the studio’s losses, but still let anything left go to general auction. Yes, a poor break for the company, but that would be the loss accrued from a bad buyout.

That would mean that buyout/slash isn’t a viable method to gain someone’s patents, or kill competition.