Do you ever drive by a restaurant that opens and closes the same week after an over-hyped launch? Most wonder, “How bad could it have been?” when the real question should be, “When did the owners know it wasn’t working?” There’s concern for a place that closes as fast as it opens, and then there’s the panic after it turns out the food served released an E. coli outbreak. Either way, they’ve left town with your money, and it makes you sick. It’s a metaphor, but the video game equivalent is ‘The Day Before,’ and the chop-n-slop cook with unwashed hands slipping away with the money is Eduard Gotovtsev and Fntastic Studios.
Anticipated MMO ‘The Day Before’ has been removed from Steam amid ever-increasing glitch-riddled videos and negative early-access reviews being released. Mounds of refund requests have halted the game from being sold on the Steam store, effectively killing the game 4 days after arrival. Its has been honored as the “Worst Reviewed Game Ever” by gamers all over the internet, and now comes questions about Fantastic Studios and whether this video game was another carrot in a list of Bait/Switch Ponzi schemes that have grown over the years in the video game realm.
Fantastic Studios has announced that it has no funding to continue developing ‘The Day Before,’ and all proceeds will be used for debt repayments. The zombie survival MMO was published in 2021 and was initially scheduled for release in June 2022. The game was highly wanted, and by the trailer footage, the hype for ‘The Day Before’ was aiming for a red-hot release. However, it was postponed to March 2023 due to changing game engines and *ahem* quality control.
CEO Eduard Gotovtsev, in a company letter, thanked his staff amid the painful news. Even though reports had questioned whether ‘The Day Before’ was a scam, the statement doesn’t go into the allegations. Instead, it opts for an ‘it is what it is’ memo in between, assuring the public no money was taken from crowd support.
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“There was no resale or crowdfunding campaign. I’ve been working hard for five years, telling us that the game was full of blood, sweat, and tears “.
He apologized for ‘The Day Before’ not being able to live up to his expectations and apologized for his company, Fntastic Studios, not fulfilling his vision. In June 2022, despite ‘The Day Before’ is one of Steam’s most wanted titles, Fntastic Studios was chastised for using “unpaid volunteers.” The developer then defended its use of unpaid “volunteers,” writing in a website update, “Fntastic’s culture is founded on the concept of volunteering. This means that every member of Fntastic is a volunteer.” It went on to say that while “full-time volunteers” are essentially paid employees, “part-time volunteers” are unpaid developers who are instead given “cool rewards, participation certificates, and free codes” in exchange for their efforts. Now that Fantastic Studios (dumb name ngl) has shut down completely, fans can only hope that these “volunteer workers” see some revenue or legal recourse from Eduard Gotovtsev besides some broken-skin mods for a dead video game.
In response to the closing announcement, ‘The Day Before’ official Discord servers/channels have already been removed, and the YouTube channel has disappeared. Eduard Gotovtsev has also deactivated his X account, possibly due to the negative reaction.
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The video game stats so far are that 2,643 reviews were submitted through Steam: 16,890 negative and 3,753 positive ratings were received. Gamers made sure to tell the CEO of Fntastic Studios and any potential customers their feelings on the whole situation:
This might be another crack in the shady financial dealings that some indie developers stoop to to get hard-earned money from fans and gamers, whether by fake trailers or programmers conned into working for free. We will keep our readers posted on this and other shenanigans plaguing the video game industry.
What do you think about this whole mess? Another cautionary tale of the early access ‘pre-order video gaming experience’ or the selfishness of a possibly predatory indie developer? Leave a comment below!
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