Nobody really knows at this point whether or not Epic will shut down UT4 just like it did with Paragon. At this point it makes little sense to do so and the game is recently showing new signs of life even without Epic’s attention.
While the community is still extremely small, there has been a steady increase in the number of players lately. The Unreal Carnage Hub has seen its highest bandwidth usage ever in the last month since it has been in operation (since March 2015).
Additionally, many people are reporting that you can jump in a Quickmatch and almost always find players right away, most often with many non-familiar names that are new to the game. The interesting thing about Quickmatch players is that they are not counted in the game anywhere so nobody really knows how many there are. Only Epic knows…
Lastly, the Pro Weapons mod has been very well received with some long time players coming back to the game because of the mod.
Only time will tell how this plays out, but there are promising signs of life.