Fntastic, the allegedly shut down developer of The Day Before, has claimed its controversial and catastrophic game suffered from a hate campaign in a bizarre statement published online.
Fntastic, which supposedly closed its doors just a few days after The Day Before launched on December 7, 2023, took to X/Twitter to address “misinformation” published online surrounding the game’s development.
Answering its own question of, “Why do they say that the released game is not the same as that in the trailers, and why was the game closed?”, Fntastic claimed it “implemented everything shown in the trailers” before admitting it didn’t include some “minor features” like parkour.
It then likened The Day Before to “the experiment where you’re asked to count pink objects in a room and then recall the blue ones”, saying “the negative bias instilled by certain bloggers making money on hate affected perceptions of the game”.
The Day Before, which was promised for years to be an open-world, survival massively multiplayer online game, emerged as an extraction shooter riddled with issues. “This wholly disappointing online zombie survival shooter contains essentially nothing of what was originally promised over the years leading up to its disastrous Early Access release,” IGN said in a rare 1/10 review.
Fntastic claimed reviews improved over launch weekend as it addressed initial bugs, but “the hate campaign had already inflicted significant damage”. In reality, however, The Day Before’s numbers dipped day by day and by December 11 it had entered Steam’s 10 worst reviewed games of all time list.
“By the way,” the developer added, “after sales closed, many people wrote to us that bloggers had deceived them and they like the game, and they asked for access. We also heard that petitions were created to continue development, and on the black market, the game’s price exceeded $200, and some even began to make their own mods.”
Fntastic then asked fans of the game to follow it on social media to “know what will happen next”, adding further confusion to the status of the allegedly defunct developer. Questions were already raised after launch following what looked like an attempt to change the company name, though Fntastic denied it did so and insisted it really was closed down. There are also reports the company’s CEOs are already working on a new game.
⚡Recently, a lot of misinformation has emerged on the Internet from supposedly anonymous sources. Fntastic provides an official response to these statements.#fntastic #thedaybefore pic.twitter.com/zRKWQ1nfmr
— Fntastic (@FntasticHQ) January 24, 2024
The Day Before was once Steam’s most wishlisted game before a strange series of events caused fans to grow more and more suspicious and concerned. Fntastic was accused of ripping off other games like The Division, Call of Duty, The Last of Us, Cyberpunk 2077, Grand Theft Auto 5, and more, on separate occasions, for example, and a trademark dispute complicated things too.
In November 2023, seven months after it promised no more delays, Fntastic delayed The Day Before again, this time indefinitely though its PC version would arrive in Early Access a month later. Obviously that launch did not go well, but as Fntastic was allegedly shut down, refunds were forced through to all customers. “S**t happens,” the developer said at the time.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
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