I don't think it was abandoned. This was discussed a few weeks ago when it went down.
SirWoogie on the "build your own arcade controls" said that this was not a payment or other glitch that caused it to go down. Somehow they were labeled as a Spam sender. He said the spam messages that were reported had the "localarcade web address" in the message. But they were not sent from their server, and was trying to explain to GoDaddy (I think) that localarcade did not send the messages. Last I saw he was having problems talking to a person that could correct the problem. So I believe that this will get fixed just taking some time.