BW Effects has supposedly been replaced by Studio 2 (https://help.topazlabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001521092-Legacy-Products), but although you can convert an image to Black & White in Studio 2, what you can do with this newer program in this respect is not as much as you could do in comparison with BW Effects. One can say that other plugins might have been replaced by Studio 2 or by their newer AI versions, but not BW Effects.
There might be other programs that have a similar function, I don’t know of much, but I remember that when I decided to buy BW Effects I had to choose between it and Silver Effex Pro as it was said that this two were the best around for the task, and I chose BW Effects.
Maybe Topaz is thinking to release a B&W AI, which I am not sure it would make much sense. Or maybe an updated release including masks with or without U Point technology (though some of Topaz programs have very good masking capabilities), but I haven’t read anything about this being in the plans of Topaz Labs. Are there any such plans?
Might it be that Topaz Labs sold their plugin or its technology to another company and agreed not to use it in their own programs from now on?
What you can do with Studio 2 in terms of converting to black & white is nothing of the like of what you could do with BW Effects (and can still do if you already own the plugin), so: why not keep selling BW Effects as a Legacy product, cheaper than the new plugins or why not give it as a bonus if somebody buys no less than x Topaz Labs products (or whatever)? Production costs for BW Effects have been obviously amortized so it could be sold cheap. It had not bugs that I know of, it does a great job and is very powerful for what it does, it can be opened in any computer (no matter how old) and in any program that admits plugins (being them for 32 or 64 bits indistinctly). If I didn’t have it and it were being sold cheap, I would certainly go for it. Luckily, I bought it when it was still around.