The Day Before
Where to begin with The Day Before, the high profile survival MMO that instead launched as a terrible, broken extraction shooter. On Monday, just four days after release where it became one of Steam’s lowest scored games ever, developer Fntastic announced that the game was a “financial failure” and they were shutting down the entire studio.
This led to both general astonishment, but also instant accusations that Fntastic, whoever actually works there (this remains unclear) was taking the money and running, having brought in millions in fast sales from the $40 release of the game on Steam. After that, things happened very quickly:
- The entire Fntastic website was erased, replaced only by the studio closure message.
- The Day Before’s YouTube channel was scrubbed completely of all videos, including the misleading trailers it’s been releasing for months and years.
- The Day Before Discord was mostly shut down leaving only a few channels for players to scream into.
- The alleged Twitter account of the CEO was deleted.
So yes, that uh, looks bad. But in reality, it seems entirely likely that Fntastic will see none of this money, something they themselves said in the only form of online communication they haven’t deleted, the company Twitter account.
This, though it may sound like a lie, is not actually a lie, because when you sell a game on Steam, you are not immediately getting that money transferred to your account, 30 days after the end of each calendar month, so Fntastic has not indeed gotten any money yet, nor, as they have said, was the game funded by any sort of crowdsourcing campaign.
And though Fntastic offers refunds in this tweet, Steam was already doing that well before this, waiving its usual restrictions on playtime to allow anyone to get a refund for the game. Even before the shutdown, The Day Before had something like a 49% refund rate. Now? It seems extremely likely Fntastic will in fact see nothing from this, and is likely deep in debt from if not developing the game, at least marketing it.
Publisher Mytona also chimed in with a message, a little known company that was a backer for Fntastic and The Day Before. They apologized, offered refunds, and “contacted Fntastic regarding the future of the game” to which the question of course is “what future?” The game isn’t being sold on Steam anymore, and while servers may currently be online, that is likely to change any minute now.
Perhaps the cherry on everything here was Fntastic responding to one of ten thousand tweets calling them a disgrace, saying “This was our first big experience. S*** happens.”
Honestly, I cannot think of a better ending. Let this be a lesson to us all.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
