I guess it comes down to how you might want to present a company for sale. If you have some workers apparently working on a new project as well as a core title just launched but ripe for improvement and exploration, maybe it might appeal to e.g. Smoking Gun?
This could be. If they are planning on selling it, they might want to make it look like it isn't gutted. I don't think that will work especially well considering that any company that buys them would normally want sales numbers anyway.
My first job out of college was with a company that was managed into bankruptcy and then bought by a Japanese firm. I'll never understand why, but the Japanese left the same managers in charge that put it into bankruptcy and they continued managing the same way. A similar thing happened to one of my relatives in a different industry. Maybe it's a cultural thing?