While a “certain someone” wanted nothing more than to praise 2023 for its “gaming excellence,” people who actually lived and worked during that period know that it was hardly flawless. One of the biggest issues is that the games released that year had a huge pendulum swing when it came to quality. Plenty of titles were “Game of the Year worthy,” and then there were titles that made people wonder why they came out. One such title that helped end the year was The Day Before, a game so bad that its studio shut it down in just two months.
People wondered if the game would live up to the hype even before its launch. It was meant to be a very in-depth survival MMO in a version of New York where yet another post-apocalyptic experience had gone down. First glances at the title made gamers feel it could be something good, but they grew suspicious when the game kept getting delayed. Sure enough, the “final version” was nothing like what was advertised before, and people were ticked.
Fast forward to now, and the studio behind The Day Before, Fntastic, posted on Twitter a response to various claims about the game and the very obvious scam that they ran:
One curious thing they noted is that it was “outside forces” that doomed the game, including bloggers, of all people:
“Certain bloggers made huge money by creating false content with huge titles from the very beginning to gain views and followers, exploiting the lack of information about the game’s development. Their actions triggered a gold rush among content creators due to the game’s pre-release popularity.”
They also claimed that they “delivered” everything that was shown in previous trailers and even cited certain people “liking the game” as proof of that. The “shut down studio” further claimed that they weren’t scammers and did nothing wrong:
“We are not a fly-by-night company. We have been operating since 2015 and have always conducted our business honestly.”
That might be what they think, but it’s hardly the truth, as is evident by the game they released. One has to wonder what rose-colored glasses they were looking through when they made that statement. Perhaps they’re trying to fight back against any lawsuits or inquiries into how they ran things when making the game. But the results are the same. If it was just a “bad game,” we wouldn’t be talking about this. But this wasn’t just that, it was something more sinister, and they’re paying the price because of it.
