I don’t want to go into any kind of detail, partly because we do not have finalised plans yet and partly because I don’t want to get people too excited at this point. But at the core of the current AS stagnation are essentially two issues:
Number 1 is that the current codebase of AS is around 15 years old (or “ancient” in software terms) and that many of features available today are essentially broken. The stock market, aircraft market and alliances have been mentioned above, but I could list more examples. So adding new or overhauling features is difficult both for technical and for game design reasons.
Number 2 is that the company needs more than one leg to stand on if we want to continue making (and supporting) games in the future. Keep in mind that AS has been around for almost 20 years now (post on that coming soon) and we have no plans of stopping to operate it. Prosperous Universe is our first attempt at spreading the risk, but we are a tiny team and working on more than one project at a time while one of them only just launched in Early Access is extremely tough.
So long story short: Some things (that I can’t and don’t want to discuss just yet) are planned for AS, but we are spread thin in terms of resources and everything will take some time (as usual). Meanwhile, AS is going to continue, even the old game worlds that - at this point - generate a questionable amount of revenue 