It was (allegedly) a lot more complicated than that. A non-exhaustive summary is that:

Dead Cells was created by Motion Twin which is explicitly a worker coop which has a lot of implications on business decisions and what projects they work on. When they were mostly churning out web games and mobile slop, it was great. When they suddenly had one of THE biggest indie games on the planet? And a corporate structure that fundamentally limits the size of the company?

Some people wanted to keep working on that to make money. Others wanted to keep making new games. So it led to spinning off Evil Empire (explicitly not a coop) to support Dead Cells but with creative control still going back to MT.

So it was pretty much inevitable that they would go their separate ways with Motion Twin doing their own new game and Evil Empire doing Prince of Persia.