The lesson is that there's no guaranteed ROI for either games development or pure STEM research, so people are justifiably stingy with money and play hardball with contracts.

If you don't believe me, the Kickstarter craze a few years ago exposed all of this to the consumer. Many games were hyped well and got huge funding but were released to mediocre-to-bad reviews and much backer regret, to say nothing of the ones which fell apart completely during development and were never successfully released.