Watching a company die over the course of a week from its largest game drop is heartbreaking. The FNTASTIC developers—of The Day Before infamy—have been shut down. This is a brief overview of the week after The Day Before, from FNTASTIC’s Twitter account.
It began with, as the developers highlighted, “the day before the day before.”
This simple tweet, launched just before the Early Access release of The Day Before, was an unknowing herald of the end times. In the comments, you can see enthusiastic but wary players—some are congratulating FNTASTIC on the launch of their biggest project yet, while others warn the company that they’ll be watching from a distance, though they “really do hope [FNTASTIC] can make this work.” In hindsight, this little tweet’s lack of punctuation or capitalization should have been a little telling.
And then, the release. “After five years of blood, sweat, and tears, we can finally say these words: THE DAY BEFORE IS OUT NOW!” An excited tweet, followed with a hashtag, brings viewers to the Steam page of the game. A game which, a mere five days after launch, would be taken off of the Steam store.
Fans in the replies of this tweet are furious. Their complaints range from accusations of lying, confirmations that “this game is trash,” and even jokes about how attorneys should prepare for the upcoming lawsuits. The very few comments commending the game seem ironic—even if they aren’t—amidst the sea of negativity.
That same day, FNTASTIC’s Twitter was trying to put out fires, announcing that the servers “are working” but just filling up too fast. This tweet was received somewhat more positively than the initial release’s. Most players were, justifiably, quite mad about the lack of server options and the poor optimization of said servers. Some suggested a queue system, so they could know how long they’d be waiting to be let in. The top comment, eclipsing the likes of the initial tweet, suggested that Fntastic “should have added more servers the day before.”
The day after, FNTASTIC’s twitter announced “a huge update,” with server and AI fixes. Hilariously, this update included a few ideas from the negative replies to the initial server tweet, though nothing as expansive as a queue.
Unfortunately, according to the replies, The Day Before was already reaching the end of its exceptionally short lifespan. Players received this update news poorly, to say the least, with most showing screenshots of The Day Before‘s miserable Steam reviews and commenting on how the update came far too late to save the dying game. To say that this was a lambasting of the company would be an understatement; it was clear by now that players were done with The Day Before, less than a day after it was launched on Steam.
And, that was it for the weekend. The Twitter account said nothing until Dec. 11, where the now infamous “Official statement” circulated. The biggest tweet of the company’s history, followed by three hashtags, depicted a simple white image with black text, explaining that the company would be closing down after eight years of working in the game industry.
Re-tweeted just above this was a message from FNTASTIC’s parent company, Mytona, apologizing to players about how the game “didn’t meet the expectations of the majority of players.” The comments to both of these tweets are filled to the brim with accusations—pointing out that leaving within a week of selling a huge game is suspect, demands that everyone who purchased the game gets a refund, and more. The official accounts for Opera GX and Voicemod even jumped in to comment on how quickly the company was bailing out of a project they spent “five years” working on. If The Day Before wasn’t the laughingstock of the internet yet, it surely became one here. The game was so bad that, over a single weekend, it brought down a game company with eight years of experience under its belt.
Also on Dec. 11, FNTASTIC posted an update on its work with Mytona and Steam to ensure all The Day Before players can receive a steam refund, emphasizing that it received “$0 and will receive nothing from The Day Before sales.”
From here, FNTASTIC’s twitter representative went into cleanup duty. They responded to four comments on their tweets; the first was a fake title of The Day Before 2, where the response was a simple and cold “nope, we’re closing.” Another was “The IP doesn’t belong to FNTASTIC studio,” a response to a player who wanted the company to sell the game to someone else.
Another was a pretty humiliating response to a tweet accusing the company of taking assets from the UE store, saying that the user “flipped the numbers.” Unfortunately for them, Twitter decided to slap them with a “Readers added context” remark, linking to a Reddit post. This post is a lambasting of the assets used in The Day Before, finding dozens of examples of UE assets that the game used.
One of the final responses was a simple tweet responding to an enraged fan, saying simply and easily that “it was their first big experience.”
What a way to go out. Replies to this were filled with players poking holes in that simple phrase, talking about the misleading advertising and awful decision making that led FNTASTIC to their “first big experience.” It was both immature and, in a way, awesome.
The Day Before cannot be purchased on Steam anymore, ending a four day early access cycle for fans of the game. This is a very quick shut-down of a title players have been waiting five years for, cementing the idea that FNTASTIC may have just been scamming players with the not-MMO. Surely, it would be willing to do more than two hotfixes for a game its put five years of effort into, right?
