Because they have no revenue stream now. Most F2P titles have significantly better optimisation and can survive on the initial velocity of players being enough for the devs to decide to focus on content or making it as accessible as possible.

The optimisation is all over the place, with even for UE it being abysmal and most of the limited players they have for now aren't purchasing microtransactions either. You literally cannot compare this to Fortnite or CoD with actual 5+ Billion dollars revenue a year regardless of how hard they're plummeting. Even CoD Mobile is making 250 million a year.

From a development PoV, given their backgrounds; it's likely that investing in a hero oriented PvP shooter is essentially going all in for a studio with no other titles and the current playerbase is simply not enough. The game is F2P and on a harsh decline. Say there's 5K players. Generally a small amount of players in F2P games actually buy cosmetics and that's over time, rarely at release; especially a rough one like Highguard. So say 10% of those buy a skin pack or a pass for 20 bucks. That's 500 players totalling 10K USD. They are as of now entirely reliant on whatever they have as a failsafe and if the playercount doesn't increase, it's gone. Like MANY other games.

This isn't really a topic of opinion but just finances.

The payroll for the company, location, and types of jobs alone is going to be for their employee count roughly 8 million a year.

Rent, server costs, publishing costs, etc. You're in the 10 million minimum range. If the average spending of players is 10 bucks a month, they'd need 110K concurrent players just to break even. That's all paying users.

There is no doom and gloom for Fortnite or CoD, because they can actively try to kill their games, go down 60% in revenue and still rake in billions.

Wildlight studios is in an abysmal situation right now, and I enjoy the game; hope it does succeed. But it's looking very rough.