You know, I got a different takeaway. Troika was always at the mercy of their publishers. They never had the same one twice, and they always got pushed to finish their games sooner. Something has to give, and it's almost always testing.

From the article:
"Right or wrong, we just needed more time to test and polish the games, and none of our three publishers were willing to give it to us. Each and every game was pulled out of our hands before we were through with it. In all fairness, I have to say that we were late and over budget, but that still does not justify giving the public an unfinished product."

Troika isn't entirely blameless. They were incredibly ambitious with their designs, or horribly understaffed, or both. For one of them, they mentioned being in crunch mode for four years! That's just crazy and inhumane.
 

Yep, in fact, Leonard Boyarsky even states, "After the lessons we learned on Arcanum, I think a better way to go would have been to get independent financing for the bulk of the dev cycle for a game, and then bring it to publishers when it was more than half finished to help bring it to market."

If only it were that easy.