One reason for the game's continued popularity is it's dedicated and competent mods community.
We're not sure what happened with the developers (who still seemed to be patching the game and releasing DLC), but at one point they got sued by Rebellion so, it's good that they're hanging in there at least. About the only true 'sin' of SOASE is that it never got a proper sequel, even after all this time. It was a flawed experience, but one the team at Ironclad Games attempted to iterate on through several expansions, such as Trinity, and then the 'definitive' edition of the game with 2012's Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion.
Originally released in 2008, it combined the best of RTS games and 4X games to create a wonderfully ruthless space-based strategy experience where you had fleets of capital and sub-capital ships dancing around from system to system as you fought for dominance over randomised maps.
Sins of a Solar Empire was a great entry strategy game for its time.
