The latest turn in the saga of Fntastic and The Day Before probably will surprise you, even if it doesn’t erase any doubts you have about the project.
As reported by The Gamer, Fntastic has shared a new tweet claiming that their woes with The Day Before trademark has led to their recently released gameplay video being removed from Steam, as well as YouTube.
For those who may not know or remember, The Day Before is a highly anticipated open world zombie game that had a really good announcement trailer all the way back in 2021.
Doubts recently came up about The Day Before when developer Fntastic suddenly announced a drastic delay in its release date from March to November of this year. Fntastic stated that the reason for this delay was a sudden trademark dispute over the name of the game.
Now, we have a little better picture about this situation. Fntastic revealed that after they revealed their game, another dev filed a trademark for the name The Day Before. That dev made a calendar app, called The Day Before. The dev also listed the name of their company as The Day Before, Inc. This is a real calendar app, listed on both the iOS and Android stores (we have screenshots you can see below). The app seems functional, but isn’t particularly great, and reviews complain about some issues with it.
As shady as Fntastic has seemed, it looks like they genuinely fell victim to a copyright troll. It isn’t hard to imagine one such individual or entity looking at announcements of new products, checking the trademark or copyright status of said product, and then filing a claim before them. The objective of such a scheme would be to get the original entity who made the announcement, in this case Fntastic, to pay up so they can use that trademark themselves, in this case to The Day Before, Inc. There is a possibility that this is all a huge coincidence, but it’s very unlikely given how every base was covered to coerce Fntastic to work with the trademark holder. With all that said, just because you filed first doesn’t mean you necessarily own the copyright or trademark. There are ways for Fntastic to legally get the name of the game back, and they may be right to be confident that they will.
Getting back to the gameplay footage, we reported on the gameplay when it released. We also noted that it received criticism for a perceived drop in quality from the announce trailer.
In fact, it turns out there have been skeptics following this project for years, who were able to trace that Fntastic had made two mobile games before, and hid away their involvement in them. It was these skeptics who Fntastic denounced as spreading disinformation. To be clear, the picture that had been formed by these skeptics is not that the game is fake. Rather, they think parts of the reveal are misleading and the game could actually be much worse when it does come out.
Whether you believe Fntastic or their claims about their game, the evidence we have now seems to indicate that they were telling the truth about this trademark dispute after all. We should not be raising doubts about this particular point anymore.
