As it turns out, though, at least one part of the debacle was unfounded: 3D Realms isn't going to completely shut down. The company issued a release today declaring that the company "has not closed and is not closing." However, the development team working on Duke Nukem Forever has been let go due to a lack of funding. The company plans to "continue to license and co-create games based upon the Duke Nukem franchise."
The release also responds to some of the things put forth in Take-Two's lawsuit against 3D Realms and gets into some of the funding details surrounding Duke Nukem Forever. While Take-Two claims it paid $12 million to acquire the publishing rights to the game, that money was apparently paid to GT Interactive (which went on to rebrand as Infogrames and then Atari), not 3D Realms.
So, publisher-developer lawsuits aside, the "continue to license and co-create" Duke Nukem games sounds like the sort of thing that could eventually lead to the release of Duke Nukem Forever... but it more likely has to do with stuff like Duke Nukem Trilogy, which is an upcoming set of games for the Nintendo DS and PSP being published by Deep Silver later this year.