Quote Originally Posted by Galaktica View Post
[...]so it stands to reason their budget has increased as well because they want this game to keep making more and more money.
The question is: The budget for the regular game, or the budget for the cash shop? Since the subscription is flat, you gain the same subscription regardless of whether you do more or less for it. And since the playerbase doesn't seem to have a net growth anymore, trying to increase subscription volume seems pointless. So you'd rather want to reduce your investments for regular content to the minimum needed to hold the whales and maximize cash shop investment to milk the whales. That's profit maximizing.

With enough confirmation bias, I could probably find that exact strategy in SEs actions. But I'll rather just put it out there and let others argue one way or the other.