I did not expect to see that particular line of text ever again. Gave me a chuckle.

WELL, LET'S START WITH THE BAD NEWS. PLENTY TO GO AROUND.

Nick Popovich and Ian McConville both left Three Rings for Monomi Park, a company currently known for its in-dev game Slime Rancher. According to Nick, the Spiral Knights IP was never his to begin with, and Ian hadn't been making art for Spiral for a while now.
Additionally, a portion of Three Rings employees have been laid off by SEGA (I am never going to buy anything Sonic-related due to this), so any possible development has been set back further. Arcade Redux has been a vague, VAGUE idea for some time now, and Valestone and Moonstone are all but useless save for occasional Prestige turn-in missions.
There has been much talk of game death, the developers and Game Masters don't really talk to us much, and (as stated) prize box promotions are generally the only updates we get for anything.
Oh, and a handful of rich d00ds are inflating the CE price to hellish levels. Would work better with a larger economy, but we don't exactly have that.

HOWEVER

Although they don't say much, the admins are alive and responsive to certain major topics. The developers however are pretty much always silent; I'll explain that in a bit.

The artistry for this game is still alive and well. Wolver slippers, both Mixmaster variants, Christmas sweaters with flashing lights, Snarblepup Maskeraith reskins, scenario rooms for Winterfest in order to get the aforementioned sweaters, Stranger costumes (of which I actually suggested the Robe costumes, so I'm pretty thankful for that), a Starbucks-parody coffee mug bomb with a devilite on the side, and the huge assortment of monkey-themed stuff we got a month or so back exemplify that although reduced to paid-promotional stuff, there hasn't been any shortage of innovation with the dev team.

The suggestions forum has been pretty active. Lots of ingenuity coming from players.

Players that remain number around 400 a day. They consist of a small portion of market manipulators who may or may not actually like the game, a pretty sizable amount of new players, people who simply enjoy playing the game, and people that are in it for the social aspect (aka sitting around in haven doing nothing)

Far as the whole "impending doom" thing, it's on all our minds, but i personally choose to disregard it as optimism is a virtue as well as occasionally infectious. Game's only dead if everyone lets it become such.

Now, Aphrodite has stated that the devs and GMs are working together to produce content. This piece of information has led me to a conclusion, stated below:

A TIMELINE OF EVENTS:

Nick leaves Three Rings to pursue a career unhindered by SEGA. A statue is erected in his honor.

Production slows, prompting the introduction of promo boxes.

Revenue eventually decreases due to players losing interest in the game, due to slowed production.

Developers are switched out by SEGA to work on separate game titles. They scarcely have time for Spiral development at all, including popping in on forum pages.

Production slows even further due to rotation, prompting the tidal wave of boxes we've had recently.

Developers begin turning to the Game Masters for help with running SK. As their jobs consist of moderating and tech support, they're not entirely geared toward development, hence the "working with" comment made by Aphy. The Winterfest additions were made during this time along with the Stranger promo.

SEGA officially stops caring about SK, laying off a portion of OOO employees. My personal dislike for SEGA rises considerably.

By this point, the Game Masters are the sole nontransient force left in the SK staff, and as such are the ones making the promo boxes with a bit of help from the devs. This is where we are right now.

Three Rings has been more or less integrated into SEGA Networks LLC, but I'm still calling the people that work on SK Three Rings. It's a legacy that deserves recognition.

So to answer your question, no sk is not kill.
Until the day some head honcho over in sonicland flips the kill switch on Cradle and the Spiral Knights servers, I and the rest of us that are dedicated to Spiral Knights will be right here where we've always been, doing what we've always done. That's a guarantee.

meh