From Hype to Ruins: The Day Before's 4-Day Demise

It is an unfortunate reality that video game developers will sometimes terminate their game's services whether it be for financial, legal, or creative reasons. It is much rarer for a game to release in such a state that it single-handedly kills the developer. Even then, it typically takes at least a month for a company to close down. In what might be a modern record, the game The Day Before managed to end its developer, FNTASTIC, just four days after release.

The game itself can no longer be purchased on Steam, though the many negative reviews are helpfully still visible on its Steam store page. Most of these reviews more or less suggest that players felt scammed, and it's hard to blame them.

The pre-release trailers for The Day Before simply painted an entirely different picture of the game. While the concept of a post-apocalypse zombie survival MMO is hardly original, it is undeniably appealing. The game that was advertised was basically a better looking DayZ and yet, after years of delays, the only thing that worked as expected was Steam's refund policy.

The Day Before The Day Before - The History of FNTASTIC

Of course, to truly understand how The Day Before imploded in such a spectacular manner, you'd have to look at FNTASTIC's history. The studio was founded in 2015 under the name Eight Points. By February 2017 their first game, The Wild Eight, was released into early access.

If Steam reviews are any indicator of quality, then The Wild Eight is actually a fairly decent top-down survival game. However, it should be noted that the rights to the game were purchased by the publisher, HypeTrain Digital, sometime around October 2017. HypeTrain Digital supported The Wild Eight for another two years, at which point updates on Steam ceased.

Meanwhile, Eight Points moved onto their next project, a first-person horror shooter called Dead Dozen, which was released in March 2018. It seems like this is when Eight Points became known as FNTASTIC as this is the name of developer listed on the Steam store page. Unfortunately for the studio, the Steam reviews for Dead Dozen were mostly negative, and the game received its last update in June 2018. In fact, you can't purchase the game on Steam anymore.

In July 2018, FNTASTIC released Radiant One, an artistic story-driven adventure game that revolves around lucid dreams. Radiant One was actually fairly well received, if a bit short.

Three years later, FNTASTIC released Propnight, a first-person horror themed multiplayer game similar to Dead by Daylight. Propnight was supported until May 2023, though it didn't appear to have had any effect on the game's mixed reviews. 

Interestingly enough, Propnight and The Day Before were published by Mytona Fntastic according to the games' Steam store pages. According to their public website, Mytona Fntastic is a "joint venture by Fntastic and Mytona since 2021." Mytona itself is headquartered in New Zealand and appears to mostly publish mobile games, though they were founded in Siberia and have offices in places like Singapore and San Francisco now.

A Not-So-Fantastic Development Cycle for The Day Before

This brings us to The Day Before. Announced in January 2021 as a post-apocalyptic zombie survival MMO, The Day Before originally had a June 2022 launch window. Initial impressions of the announcement trailer were comparatively favorable as it looked like the game would combine elements of The Division and The Last of Us. At the very least, around 2.5 million people saw the announcement trailer on IGN's YouTube channel to date, suggesting that there was some level of genuine interest early on.

By the end of 2021, it seems like FNTASTIC either moved their office or opened another location in Singapore.

Regardless, a delay was announced in May 2022 due to a decision to switch to Unreal Engine 5, pushing the release date to March 1, 2023. This alone should have been a major warning sign as game developers tend to not switch engines that late into development. Switching engines and then promising a game as complex as a survival MMO after a year is virtually unheard of.

In June 2022, the developers asked for help from "part-time volunteers" to "offer their unique skills to improve our projects or create new special features." 

Sometime around January 2023, The Day Before was delayed yet again due to trademark disputes, setting the release date back to November. As this should theoretically be a matter for lawyers to handle and not game developers, it is bizarre that the name of a calendar app of all things (filed by a single private individual in South Korea no less) would be the cause of a yearlong delay.

One final delay was announced in November, giving us a December 7 launch date and the source of the company's current infamy. By this point, The Day Before missed its original launch date by a year and half. The only gameplay footage that emerged during this time did little to assuage fears that The Day Before would be in trouble. 

The Day Before Launching Dead on Arrival

To say that The Day Before had a lot of launch-day problems would be an understatement. From what can be told, you would need to imagine the worst case of missing features, bugs, and performance issues in any game you've ever played and then multiply those issues by about 100.

To put this in perspective, according to IGN's review of the game, the player character apparently couldn't melee. As in the game literally didn't have any melee mechanic whatsoever. Early claims that The Day Before would be a survival MMO were evidently greatly exaggerated as there was nothing massively multiplayer about it. To rub salt into the wound, the game turned out to be a PvP focused extraction shooter.

Needless to say, gameplay footage from IGN's review of The Day Before makes Gollum look like a Game of the Year contender. Frankly, it might've for the best that FNTASTIC shut down four days after The Day Before's launch as it's practically inconceivable that any developer would be able to salvage the situation. 

Of course, you're free to come to your own conclusions about whether or not The Day Before was a scam, but it's obvious that this is yet another example of pre-release footage not representing the final product. If nothing else, this is probably the one of the few times in recent memory where the phrase "literally unplayable" can be used without exaggeration.