the game is dead too
to be fair, isn’t this why the forum is shutting down? I’ve honestly only lurked here for the most part, even then I forget that I had an account in the first place
You are kind of making this point way too late. The forum is already closing down soon.
The fact that the forum is a separate website that isn’t based off of a main website (e.g. it is not a subreddit or Steam discussions), kind of led to its downfall. I still think that the forums here are formatted so much better in comparison to Steam right now, but that doesn’t make up for the lack of activity.
As for the game being dead, I would argue that the player count is stable. It isn’t high, but the people who play are playing. For instance, on most days we get about 2.9-3.4 thousand players on servers, at least logged through Restore Monarchy. This has been the trend for a while. Me personally, that does not fit my definition of dead. However, it is far less than the peaks we had a few years ago (if you subtract the bots).