The early access launch of The Day Before is the video game scandal of this end of the year. Four days after its release, the game considered a scam was removed from Steam and its development studio announced its closure. A game that was highlighted by Nvidia for several months.
When a scam affects tens of thousands of players as was the case with the launch of The Day Before, it is important to look at the causes of the problem. Billed as a revolutionary survival MMO halfway between The Last of Us, The Division or DayZ, the game has clearly not respected any of its promises. The early access launch on December 7 at 40 euros was quickly accompanied by particularly negative opinions from players and the press.
Today, the title was removed from Steam, studio Fntastic announced its closure, and a large-scale refund campaign was implemented. The press is unanimous: The Day Before was a big scam.
Who advertised such a project?
To understand how such a game was able to obtain such an audience and come out of the woodwork, we must question its promotional campaign. There are of course the promises made by the studio which were enough to attract customers, but the title also received great support. Thus, the media IGN promoted the title for more than two years with trailers of gameplay « exclusive“. But the American media is not the only one involved. Nvidia has not missed an opportunity for more than 11 months to promote The Day Beforea game ” RTX On ” who is “improved thanks to ray tracing and Nvidia DLSS 3“.
The trailer released by Nvidia on YouTube has been viewed more than 380,000 times, not counting promotion on other social networks by the graphics card brand. Nvidia has an excellent brand image thanks to high-performance and quality products. So when it associates its brand with the launch of a game, it inevitably generates attraction.
This is not the first time that a brand has been singled out for promoting such a project. In 2021, Sony highlighted the project AbandonedA ” cinematic survival simulator» on the PlayStation Blog. A game that turned out to be nothing more than a few short trailers not showing much and probably an attempted scam looking to gather investors. The major difference, however, is thatAbandonedwas never released or offered for pre-order.
Between paid advertising and partnership
In the case of PlayStation likeIGN, these are quite simply advertising spaces paid by developers to showcase their games. It was not the IGN editorial team who decided to highlightThe Day Before. It was the Fntastic studio that was able to pay for its promotion in events such as “E3 conference» broadcast byIGN. This is part of the classic cycle of promoting a project in development, although it is clear that greater rigor should have been employed to avoid promoting what turned out to be a scam.
Nvidia’s case is a little more complex. We are talking here more of a partnership since the Fntastic studio had announced support for the brand’s technologies such as Nvidia DLSS. It was give and take, but Nvidia used a game that turned out to be a scam to both promote its own technologies, but also sell the game in question.
Fortunately, in this case, all players will be correctly reimbursed by Steam. Let’s hope that all those involved will now be more vigilant for projects currently in production.