Same happened to a game I used to play. The original dev sold it because he didn't have the time to run it alone, and the new owners decided they didn't get enough money from the players, so they started charging for API use. The people building 3rd party apps and websites with stats and tools then either killed their tools or asked their users to pay. An efficient way to get users to leave. And I guess with fewer users it's cheaper to run the game, eh?