1 Week After ‘The Day Before’ Launches, Fntastic Closes Its Doors For Business

Scams

from the poof-they're-gone dept

As the old saying goes, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it’s probably a scammy game developer you shouldn’t trust. Here at Techdirt, we started paying attention to The Day Before, pitched as an ambitious MMO survival game by Russian developer Fntastic nearly five years ago, when the company claimed it had to delay its launch over a trademark dispute with some random calendar app maker. From there, Fntastic indicated it was going to change the name of the game, but ultimately didn’t. To that end, The Day Before released on Steam nearly a week ago.

After which the game got absolutely slammed by reviewers in the public and game journalists alike. As we go through this, keep in mind the paragraph I wrote in the last piece I did on this whole fiasco:

Where to start? Well, let’s start with the basics: is developer FNTASTIC actually making a real game? Who knows! And that’s a pretty big issue as we dive into the rest of this. You can go see some of the concerns that have been expressed for yourself, but this game has gone from slick trailer to unimpressive gameplay trailer over several years, gets its funding from a Russian publisher that hasn’t produced anything remotely on the scale of this game, and has a release date that’s pushed back more than offensive lineman on a run play. And the latest change in release date supposedly centered around a trademark dispute, all due to FNTASTIC doing an oopsie and forgetting to register the trademark for The Day Before back when the game development cycle first kicked off.

When you have to start a post on the topic of a video game with, “Hey, ya’ll, this game might not be real!,” that’s never a good sign. All kinds of rumors and accusations have been floating around about this game and Fntastic. It was vaporware designed to extract investment money for a game that would never come out. It was a money-laundering operation. The whole thing was some other kind of scam. And through it all, Fntastic provided occasional updates and trailers from the game, each of which was a further devolution in gameplay and graphics from the previous update.

And, yet, despite all of that the game enjoyed a huge amount of sales upon release last week. But that was about the only good thing the game had going for it, short-lived as it was.

The Day Before finally came out, and it was broken. The game immediately shot into the top sellers list on Steam with over 30,000 concurrents, but only a fraction of those players could successfully play the game.

Those who could play noticed something unexpected about The Day Before: it wasn’t really an open-world survival MMO by typical standards. Its format of gearing up in a hub zone, deploying to an open world, then extracting your gear back home resembled more of an extraction shooter like Escape from Tarkov. This realisation was the last straw for many, but personally, it was The Day Before’s terrible shooting, boring world, and uninteresting characters that led me to uninstall it after an hour. The game is flooded with thousands of reviews on day one, settling at “Overwhelmingly negative” on Steam.

There was a ton of anger floating around about this broken, buggy game that didn’t meet any of the promises under which Fntastic sold it. More accusations that this was all a scam were made and shared across social media and Steam. Plenty of those who bought it, and plenty who did not, took a victory lap having predicted this all along. All of that occurred on release day for the game, December 7th.

Four days later, on December 11th, Fntastic announced publicly that it was shutting down and ceasing all operations beyond paying its creditors.

“Today, we announce the closure of the Fntastic studio,” began a statement tweeted by the studio on December 11. “Unfortunately, The Day Before has failed financially, and we lack the funds to continue. All income received is being used to pay off debts to our partners.”

Fntastic wrote that it worked “tirelessly for five years” on the shooter without ever taking money from players through Early Access, pre-orders, or crowdfunding. While the future of The Day Before and the studio’s other online games is “unknown,” the servers will apparently remain operational for the time being.

With some exceptions, this sort of thing just doesn’t happen. Studios have botched launches of legit games all the time. Large and small studios alike. They patch their games, they offer refunds, they make commitments about updating the game to make it better, and so on. What they generally do not do is publicly announce that they are taking whatever money was generated from the launch of a trash game to pay off what it owes and Homer Simpson into the bushes. Which, obviously, has done nothing but cement the impression that all of this was some sort of elaborate scam.

And based on what appears to be some leaked information from inside Fntastic itself, the sheer volume and percentage of those seeking refunds for their Steam purchase is breathtaking.

I’ve been trying to find an analogous situation to The Day Before in my head, and it took a long time to find one that felt right, but I think I’ve got it: Fyre Festival. You probably know that story, but Fyre Fest was a supposed production of a music festival on a secluded island, except once everyone got there, there was almost no water, very little music, a bunch of tents for people to sleep in, and cheese sandwiches to eat. Not, in other words, what those that had bought tickets in any way signed up for.

So, was this all some kind of scam? We don’t know that for sure at this time, but damn it sure feels that way. And perhaps, like Fyre Fest, we’ll eventually see a documentary come out that digs into all this and uncovers the mystery of exactly what the hell happened here. All we know for now is that the promise that was The Day Before evaporated the day after launch.

Filed Under: fyre festival, mmo, rug pull, the day before
Companies: fntastic