There's a good chance you've never heard of M2, a small free-to-play MMO developed by Japanese company Sankando and operated by Hangame, and if it wasn't for a major misstep last month, your ignorance might've gone on indefinitely. Due to a recent accident, the MMO was deleted and won't be coming back. Ever.
The story goes like this: On October 21st, M2 suffered a critical server issue and the game was taken offline to check it out. Unfortunately, the problem was widespread and the company could not restore the game's data from whatever backups it did or did not have. With no other option but to declare the title dead on arrival, Hangame posted an announcement that it somehow deleted an entire MMO and could not -- or would not -- restart it from scratch.
Hangame has since apologized and is offering conditional refunds to affected players, who were undoubtedly miffed when the money they spent on M2's microtransactions went poof during one October night.
Doubt they accidentaly removed every game file, think they didn't bring in any profit on the game and trying to cover it up, but if they speak the truth then epic fail.
I seriously fail to see how a company that runs an MMO doesn't have countless backups and isn't able to restore the full character database, and even their game for that matter. Failure and a half.
