Greetings, unfortunately, Element Quest will have to be taken down and off the Steam Store. There are multiple reasons why this is happening:
1) The game had received tremendous negative feedback from users. We initially thought players would see beyond the game's early-state flaws and believe in its potential and future but alas players see it and treat it like a full complete and paid-for product. We tried to target the widest audience, neglecting some of the game's initial quality by doing so. By providing google-translate localization to other languages, we thought non-English speakers would have the opportunity to try out and understand a game that is, in any case, short on sentences. We did plan to eventually cover the basic translation with human-made translation, at least for the countries that play EQ the most. We have implemented controller support but never advertised to have it, for some reason players with controllers didn't like that? Lack of players, due to not knowing well enough where MMO releases are advertised or how to price deals for YouTubers, etc... Or by not syncing the press with the release. Some negative reviews were just "Bad Game" / "Not Fun" / "Doesn't Feel Good" and other unhelpful "jargon". In any case, rightful or not, this is what it is. 2) Development Team Issues The team has been demotivated by the fact that the game has been taken so negatively, while trying to fix the situation, we didn't manage to score enough victories and keep the ship afloat. So negative feedback kept piling and a core developer had decided to leave. 3) No return on investment We have spent a year developing this game, paid many freelancers for art, voice acting, and other services. Alongside some promotional push which costs money as well and research experiments. The game was never close to return-on-investment, we decided to never make it a pay-to-win, we do still stick to that decision, but that may have been one of the things that made the user-acquisition plan difficult. In conclusion, we were heavily inspired by old-school MS, and had a dream, to recreate and succeed upon that old experience, bring new, modern and innovative mechanics to a side-scroller online world. Hopefully, the game will return back to service in the near future. With a better gameplay experience, a smaller target audience, no localization, maybe under a different name. It will still be supported and available on Google Play for some time. Don't lose heart, I don't plan to let it go, just learn from the mistakes and make it better. Game's Discord Server to keep in touch: https://discord.gg/NbZgMpRxqr