Long-awaited zombie MMO The Day Before recently launched to disastrous reviews – the game is so bad its developer Fntastic is shutting down.
“Today, we announce the closure of Fntastic studio,” the studio said in a statement. “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.”
Fans and onlookers were quick to immediately ask if anyone that actually bought the game will get refunds – the above statement makes it clear any profit made during its early access launch is going to pay off their creditors.
At the time of writing, The Day Before is sitting at over 18,000 mostly negative reviews on its Steam page, with some notable reviews detailing how the game didn’t live up to its promised features.
“This is not a Open World MMO, this Is a small area extraction shooter,” Daquavious said in a review. “The devs deleted all the old videos showing the open world elements. The city is dead and there are barely any open buildings.”
They added, “There are no survival elements in the game because its based on being a extraction based shooter game like Tarkov. Shame the game could have been the next DayZ. I would not recommend buying this game. Most of the city isn’t open anyways.”
To be clear, the game’s Steam page has been updated to remove mention of tags like “open world survival craft” and most especially its “massively multiplayer” tag. It’s official YouTube did remove a number of videos, and at one point its Discord was locked down too.
Here’s the full word from Fntastic:
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 release 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 no 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: Release of Propnight
- 2023: Release of The Day Before
FNTASTIC
Editor’s Note: Featured image from user Sephiroth