they would have the proven track record and clout in the industry to score a lot of funding money
No they wouldn’t. Their money came from the overall Annapurna empire.
assuming they didn’t just want to self-fund on loan (and a bank would likely be pretty receptive to that).
That… I don’t know enough about how hard banks are dicking people over these days but I can’t imagine anyone with knowledge of video games wanting to go into significant debt these days.
The reality is that they would need to find financial backers. Which… are often really bad for a lot of reasons.
I wish them the best of luck. but the AP empire has already been in the process of moving games away from API and the remnants of API have a lot of challenges ahead of them. I do not doubt for a second they have something planned if they all resigned en masse but… publishers are very much more The Man than Labor.
Best case scenario? I think it is the amongus devs who have formed their own publishing corp (I know it was a game I dislike but that made more money than many small nations)? If THEY hired API that would be amazing. But… there are lot more bad actors than there are worker-ish owned collectives.