Fntastic, the folks behind the debilitating ‘open world zombie MMO’ The Day Before, have released a statement to combat “misinformation” about its development and catastrophic release. They claim certain “bloggers” made huge money by creating “false content” about the game, and that its closure is thanks largely to a hate campaign that inflicted “significant damage”. Bizarrely, they also believe they “implemented everything shown in the trailers”. Riiight.
For those of you unfamiliar with The Day Before, it has a… storied history. After a swanky trailer back in 2022, the game became the most wishlisted thing on Steam. Fntastic then delayed it multiple times, claimed it was being worked on by volunteers, got into trademark disputes with a calendar app of the same name, and were obliged to go on record saying that The Day Before isn’t a scam. Later, they released an, as it turned out, surprisingly accurate trailer of a person jogging through an empty city and bumping into a handful of zombies. Once the game released into early access, I reviewed it, thought it was awful, and four days later its servers shut down for good. Need to lie down? I understand.
So it’s odd then, that Fntastic have re-emerged with a statement on Xwitter pushing back against folks who called the game a scam. “Remember the experiment where you’re asked to count pink objects in a room and then recall the blue ones?”, the statement says, “You won’t remember any. It’s all about focus”. They go on to say that it was “certain bloggers making money on hate” that warped our perception of the game.
What’s equally baffling is their defense of the game’s earliest trailers, saying that they “implemented everything” shown and “only disabled a few minor features”, like parkour. Eh? In fairness, the more recent trailer did capture the game’s boring nature. But if you rewind to the game’s reveal trailer and subsequent teases – since scrubbed off Fntastic’s official channels, but preserved here and here by IGN – it would be obvious to anyone, heck, even a pair of eyes scribbled on a tangerine, that they aren’t one and the same.
In a sort of I’ll have you know tone, Fntastic round off their post saying that after sales ended, “petitions were created to continue development”, and “on the black market” the game’s price “exceeded $200”. Now, I don’t think anyone would deny that there are a few people out there who, incredibly, enjoyed The Day Before. But I suspect those $200 “black market” purchases are more about people gathering morbid trophies for their Steam cabinets, than people desperate to experience hell. Also, the black market isn’t the market one should aspire to crack (unless you are an evildoer).
The final bit of the statement encourages us to subscribe to their social networks to “know what will happen next”. Odd, considering they’d said they’re shutting their doors. A Fntastic-developed live-service hero shooter with deckbuilder elements anyone? Anyone?
