We’re into day six of The Day Before drama, which certainly doesn’t embroil any of you, as our readers were too clever to buy a game that couldn’t possibly meet all its multitudinous promises from the back of a zombie shooter.
But our readers will certainly recall that the game, billed as an open-world survival MMO, was first revealed back in 2021; at the top of 2023, just ahead of a planned trailer drop and launch, the game vanished from the Steam store and YouTube over an apparent trademark dispute, then the developer admitted in an interview it had planned to delay the game anyway as it wasn’t finished. The red flags continued flying all year as the company vaguely hit MMO talking points points like housing and vehicles and jobs like artist and musician in a tiny gaming blog; it admitted to using volunteer labor, then delayed again, then shelled out for a Times Square ad and began insisting that it wasn’t a scam, which of course made everyone who already didn’t think it was a scam begin to wonder whether it was a scam.
The game’s early access launch last week was almost immediately panned as players realized the game really was just another half-baked post-apoc shooter, not anything massively multiplayer at all, without many of the features touted by developers over the last three years. The playerbase collapsed from a peak of 38,000 down to an eighth of that, with under a thousand players in there as I type this right now. The game’s Reddit is currently circulating a memo claiming nearly half of game’s copies have been refunded already – all as thousands of “overwhelmingly negative” reviews mounted and the studio seemingly scrambled to clean up Steam tags and videos that supported claims of false advertising.
As of yesterday, developer Fntastic finally admitted defeat, claiming the game had “failed financially,” that its incomes would be “used to pay off debts to [its] partners,” and that the company would be closing after five years of work on the game. It wouldn’t commit to the future of the game itself, only saying that “the servers will remain operational” for the time being, which seems incredibly unlikely now, as Steam has apparently ended sales and is refunding people who ask – including gamers well past the usual cut-off. MMO Fallout’s Connor has pointed out that Fntastic is even trying to rebrand with a new name, Eight Points, for one of its other games, which is currently being hit with a wave of scam accusations. The company has also deleted its website, scoured its YouTube page, blinked its Discord out of existence, and wiped its CEO’s Twitter.
However, the corporate Twitter is still up; there, Mytona and Fntastic claimed on Twitter that the refunds are their doing, right before the latter told an angry player, “Shit happens.”
Indeed.
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