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After "five years of blood, sweat, and tears," the studio behind The Day Before is calling it quits. Developer Fntastic, not to be confused with the word "fantastic," just announced that they are shuttering their entire studio.
This closure announcement comes literally just four days after the studio released The Day Before into Steam Early Access.
If The Day Before sounds familiar to you, there's probably a good reason for that. This is the game that was delayed several times over the past several years. First, the studio says the game was delayed due to a move from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5. Later, the game was delisted from Steam due to what Fntastic called "a minor technical difficulty." We later found out that it was delisted on Steam after the trademark owner of The Day Before made a claim against the game. Then a month after being delisted from Steam, all of The Day Before's videos were pulled from YouTube after copyright claims from a mobile calendar app named TheDayBefore.
To everyone's extreme surprise, The Day Before did eventually hit Steam, albeit in Early Access. That release came on December 7, 2023. As many streamers and several others came to find out, The Day Before ended up not being what was promised by Fntastic. Long billed as an open-world zombie survival MMO, The Day Before ended up being an extraction shooter. Extraction shooter and "open-world zombie survival" aren't exactly in the same ballpark of genres. The terms "false advertising" and "scam" were quickly shouted from players.
Those that played at the game's release noticed that the city and game looked and played nothing like what was shown in the earlier trailers. The city environment is empty, most buildings are inaccessible, and a laundry list of other features were found to be missing or cut from the earlier trailers. The list of missing features was accompanied by a list of the extensive list of assets that were purchased from the Unreal Engine marketplace and used in The Day Before. Several (if not all) NPCs utilized AI generated voices and possibly also AI generated dialogue lines.
Outright lying about what your actual game is seemed to be par for the course when it comes to this game and the studio behind it. The Day Before also shipped with countless bugs. Some bugs made it so that your character was softlocked after the very first cutscene. Other bugs were at least somewhat more amusing.
On December 11th, developer Fntastic issued an official statement on Twitter saying that they were shutting down everything.
Today, we announce the closure of Fntastic studio. Unfortunately, The Day Before has failed financially, and we lack the funds to continue. All income received is being used to pay off debts to our partners.
We invested all our efforts, resources, and man-hours into the development of The Day Before, which was our first huge game. We really wanted to relesae new patches to reveal the full potential of the game, but unfortunately, we don't have the funding to continue the work.
It's important to note that we didn't take any money from the public during the development of The Day Before; there were not pre-orders or crowdfunding campaigns. We worked tirelessly for five years, pouring our blood, sweat, and tears into the game.
At the moment, the future of The Day Before and Propnight is unknown, but the servers will remain operational.
We apologize if we didn't meet your expectations. We did everything within our power, but unfortunately, we miscalculated our capabilities. Creating games is an incredibly challenging endeavor.
We're grateful to everyone who supported us during these difficult years. It's been a fantastic journey over the past eight years:
2015: Opening of the studio
2017: Release of The Wild Eight
2018: Release of Dead Dozen
2018: Release of Radiant One
2021: Relesae of Propnight
2023: Release of The Day Before
FNTASTIC
We invested all our efforts, resources, and man-hours into the development of The Day Before, which was our first huge game. We really wanted to relesae new patches to reveal the full potential of the game, but unfortunately, we don't have the funding to continue the work.
It's important to note that we didn't take any money from the public during the development of The Day Before; there were not pre-orders or crowdfunding campaigns. We worked tirelessly for five years, pouring our blood, sweat, and tears into the game.
At the moment, the future of The Day Before and Propnight is unknown, but the servers will remain operational.
We apologize if we didn't meet your expectations. We did everything within our power, but unfortunately, we miscalculated our capabilities. Creating games is an incredibly challenging endeavor.
We're grateful to everyone who supported us during these difficult years. It's been a fantastic journey over the past eight years:
2015: Opening of the studio
2017: Release of The Wild Eight
2018: Release of Dead Dozen
2018: Release of Radiant One
2021: Relesae of Propnight
2023: Release of The Day Before
FNTASTIC
