Quest Online’s MMO Alganon has been offline since November of 2017. As noted by some eagle-eyed Reddit users, the game is currently inaccessible from the Steam store page.
Alganon originally launched in December 2009 after being criticized for borrowing heavily from World of Warcraft for its UI and mechanics.
Because of lackluster reception from critics, Quest Online decided to remove David Allen (creator of the initial idea for Alganon) and replace him with game designer Derek Smart. This prompted Allen to file a wrongful dismissal lawsuit against Quest Online, which was eventually settled.
Problems continued even after the re-launch of Alganon, which raised controversy after it was revealed that its press release bore similar copy to BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Smart told users in a Steam post back in October 2017 that low server population was the cause for infrequent updates, writing that “we were planning a visual update, and another DLC, but those plans are on hold for now.”
In November the game went offline for what was characterized as server maintenance and migration, with the last update written on January 16th.
Update: After this story was published, Smart contacted Gamasutra to state that “3000AD [his company] recently bought the company assets which includes the game, and we’re in the process of migrating it our own servers, as well as using cloud (AWS) servers as opposed to HW servers.”