After several years of troubled communication and endless controversies, The Day Before saga ends with a particularly bitter aftertaste for players. How did we go from Steam’s most anticipated game to the closure of a studio now accused of being behind a huge scam?
The Day Before is over, after a tumultuous journey to say the least. Fntastic, the studio behind the controversial game, announced its closure on Monday, December 11, after a bitter commercial failure. However, everything got off to a flying start for what was then presented as a post-apocalyptic open world MMO.
Today, the creators are accused of being behind a huge scam, aiming to abscond with the cash register just after release. So what happened? How does the game that was once at the top of the list of Steam’s most anticipated titles now collect negative reviews and struggle to reimburse dissatisfied players?
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The Day Before, huge hype then silence
It is in 2021 that the story of The Day Before begins. Fntastic then published a trailer which aroused the curiosity of many players. We discover a post-apocalyptic world, ravaged by an unknown epidemic, in which the player tries to survive among other characters and, above all, other potentially hostile players. The gameplay seems very convincing, the graphics too, in short, the hype is building very quickly.
However, already, some voices are being raised to call for caution. The gameplay is obviously scripted, while other details are particularly surprising, such as the font of the logo similar to that of The Last of Us. Despite everything, this does not prevent The Day Before from climbing to the top of the charts. games with the most wishlists on Steam.
Especially since at the start, everything seems to be going as planned. Fntastic releases a second 13-minute trailer, revealing even more gameplay then, a few months later, a launch window: June 2022. As the game has been in development for several years, no one has found anything to complain about. It didn’t take long for things to take a completely different turn.
Just one month before the presumed release date, the studio announced that it was postponing the game until March 1, 2023. Official reason: the transition from development to Unreal Engine 5. From then on, suspicions aroused. It happens that a game is postponed shortly before release, but rarely for a year, even less to change engines. To make matters worse, Fntastic later published an ad to recruit volunteer developers, which was particularly strange.
From there, things go from bad to worse. A few months later, The Day Before was delayed again, this time (supposedly) for copyright reasons. Especially since the delay is once again significant: 8 months, while the game was normally almost finished. After disappearing from Steam, the game returned in November 2023 and quickly became the game with the most wishlists.
After the catastrophic exit, accusations fly
After many adventures, The Day Before is released in early access on December 7, 2023. In just a few hours, the game climbs to the top of sales on Steam with more than 30,000 simultaneous players. Unfortunately, the suspicions accumulated over the past few months have been verified. The final product is very different from what has been presented so far. Rather than an open-world survival MMO, The Day Before is an extraction shooter similar to Escape from Tarkov.
Added to this are real performance problems, gameplay ultimately considered very boring as well as NPCs with laughable lines of dialogue. Nothing is going well, and the players are quick to let people know. At the time of writing, The Day Before is swamped with more than 20,000 reviews. “extremely negative” on Steam. Four days later, Fntastic ended a turbulent saga by announcing its permanent closure.
All this has led many Internet users to think that the studio had everything planned from the start. In other words, that The Day Before is just a scam aimed at building up the hype around the trailers, then running away with the cash once the sales have been made. Especially since Fntatisc is now committed to erasing all evidence. All the videos from his YouTube channel have disappeared, as have the messages from the studio on his Discord server. The studio nevertheless promises to reimburse all players who request it.