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No, to be more precise, it wasn't the creators, but the publishers (Ubisoft) who funded the game.
And this isn't the first time they've shown disregard for the Heroes series. Recently, they shut down the ubi.com service for 5 Heroes games (apparently, they couldn't be bothered to maintain the servers for online play – why support a game that has already sold well?). This means that if you buy a game from Ubisoft, you're buying a product with a limited shelf life (at the official level).
I haven't played the expansion with the dwarves yet. Maybe it "revived" the game.