Perhaps a better analogy is the declining shopping mall experiencing a steady decline in foot traffic and shoppers over the past several years. The mall inevitably responds by closing off areas to reduce expenses and overhead, and moves tenants into a smaller area to consolidate.
Only this actually accelerates the mall's death spiral, as tenants see the writing on the wall, terminate their leases and move their businesses elsewhere. And after the mall failed and you dig into "why" that happened, you realize it had become run down over years of neglect, as the owners had long stopped consistently picking up the trash or doing even routine maintenance. The mall had plenty of opportunities to turn around the situation, but by the time they saw the problem, the damage was done.
The problem with invoking a desperate "addition by subtraction" strategy in this situation is that it almost always leads to zero. It's difficult to see how anyone is going to buy a rank if they're concerned that their game, or the server as a whole, is going to disappear in a few months.
The obvious question is, what's their alternative? Chopping expenses can them buy time, for now, but it has to be coupled with a coherent strategy for future growth. Some additional polished maps for 1.19 on a few remaining games, regrettably, will probably not do it. Some of the games they had like TD were absolutely brilliant and unique, and could have been improved dramatically to drive traffic, but I don't think the current staff even knows what they had there. Their best chances now are to take whatever games they have left, make them rock solid and engaging, and then try to rekindle player interest through social media and other forms of promotion. Ziax needs to get people talking about Cubecraft again, they need to get players to build YouTube videos, etc., to try to drive players to the site.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with your mall analogy.
For one; our games aren't tenants. They don't move out of their own accord. So that's not a factor in what players see or what attracts people to our server.
And two; we haven't neglected Java at all. We regularly do maintenance, bugfixes, and updates to the games on there. They're not as grandiose as some people wish them to be, but we have to limit our time and attention to what we can only financially afford to for, frankly, a much smaller proportion of our player base.
Every update for a game, especially for Java, is a financial risk. These can sometimes take weeks or even months of spec'ing, dev time, and QA, plus any service costs for database / server space. And if the update doesn't hit well, that's all that time and money wasted. If it's well received then more players join, and we see player numbers (and, yes, sales) go up.
But if we don't update? The game goes stale, player numbers drop off, and the only ones left are the few players who think the game is perfect as-is, but this then costs us more money than it makes.
So ultimately they're risks we have to take.
We do our research into the games before updating, we have focus and test groups who know the games well and advise on what improvements the games need, and give feedback on our ideas, we have a whole feedback section on the forums and take onboard what is suggested there.
I'm afraid I fail to see where these plenty of opportunities were. It's something easy to say, especially with hindsight, but actually pointing out the details is where a lot of hand-wavy opinions come into the discussion, with no real facts to back them up.
We have taken plenty of opportunities and risks to get players interested in Java again over the years, listening to what the majority of players want but understanding that we won't be able to please everyone. So now we've put together a plan to revamp Java, which is potentially our biggest risk to date with the network, because the alternative is to just shut it down.
If CubeCraft was just a hobby project by a handful of us, who had money to pay for it all with no worries, then we'd be trying all sorts of crazy stuff to get the Java player numbers back up, and making stuff which was just for fun without the worry of the cost of things. But it's a business, and although I wish it didn't, it does have to be run like a business, and it has to be treated like a business.
