I would say "going dormant" is more accurate at the present. Not to say that it doesn't risk dying in that "dormant" state, but that all really depends on if Bungie uses these "slower" times to implement changes and community feedback/suggestions to the game. Bungie needs to use this downtime to go all in on a lot of these suggestions. Get feedback from the smaller community who are still here, have more one on one with the community and the like. That way when they announce their next DLC pack and the majority of the community returns for curiosity reasons they'll be hit with all sorts of implemented suggestions (perfected by the teamwork of the dev team and the reduced community) that weren't there when they left.