That’s why customer goodwill is so important. It can save you from doing a major mistake simply by the fans still buying the next game out of support for the studio.
Also, the “if we don’t get funded” message rubs me the wrong. It feels like an appeal to emotion rather than an honest message. Something along the lines of “we’ll continue looking for funding, though the project will be put on hold” would feel more genuine without tugging on heartstrings.
Let’s see how their new game idea works out. Honestly a prophunt horror game seems interesting, but I feel it’s pretty much done to death by free mods/gamemodes already.
While I agree that dd can be easily used, it still is a dumb command (as in its only purpose is to write and nothing else), which can result in some issues regarding validating the integrity of the installation, at least for a beginner.
Furthermore, it can be disastrous if you don’t pay attention to what you type in, as it will happily overwrite anything you type in.
Also, I don’t think that dd alone should be used as a backup, as it might result in inconsistent backups. The best simple backup system, no matter whether you are a beginner or an expert, are snapshots, and maybe using dd to backup those to an external drive to be sure.