It's sad how games are put in a downwards cycle because they don't 'retain or gain' members as they are updated. The last TD update was 504 days ago already and counting (
this one) and before that it took 1233 days. Because the game doesn't get updates, less people are interested in playing it, making it less 'worth' to update it, receiving less players, etc etc.
The exact same thing happened to Assassinations and many other games that have been removed in the past. I fear for TD to be honest, but I hope not...
You are right, when a game doesn't get updated for a long time, people start losing interest on it, which leads to an unavoidable lose of players. I also understand CubeCraft's point, as they are an enterprise and their objective is to earn money, which they don't get from TD as paid ranks don't give any benefit there. However, it's sad to see so many gamemodes fall in this cycle to end disappearing after some time.
Also, some developing decisions CubeCraft has taken recently don't really make sense, for example, Magic and Mayhem, which was a game that took them a lot of months to develop and a lot of effort. They didn't get any direct income from the game, as there were no ranks for i, and they only created a few small content packages for Bedrock. However, despite all the effort developing took to them, it ended disappearing less than
ONE month after its release.
That developing time would have been a better investment if they used it to update the rest of games that are on the Network, if they knew since the beginning they were going to remove Magic and Mayhem a month after being released.
Conclusion: They spent a lot of money, earned nothing, wasted a lot of valuable development time, which caused a considerable lack of updates in the rest of games. And if all this wasn't enough, most of the community got angry because of Magic and Mayhem's closure. (Same happened with the easter gamemode they released the last year btw).