Not only has open world shooter The Day Before not lasted the week but neither has developer Fntastic, in one of the year’s biggest flops.
If people were being sensible about things, there was absolutely no reason to expect The Day Before to work out. It was wildly ambitious, it was being made by an entirely untested developer, and it was constantly being accused of being a scam, long before it was ever released.
An open world zombie survival MMO, the game officially launched on Thursday, December 7 and yet just four days later, not only was the early access version made impossible to buy on Steam, but developer Fntastic has announced they’re to shut down.
They don’t seem particularly upset or reflective about it though, with one tweet from them simply saying: ‘This was our first big experience. S*** happens.’
This seems to imply they’re going to give it all another go with another game, at some later date, which given how gullible some people were over The Day Before may well work out for them.
‘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,’ reads Fntastic’s statement.
‘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.’
Fntastic has always insisted that the game is not a scam but, at the very least, the marketing surrounding it was incredibly naïve and overly optimistic.
At time of writing the game is still listed on Steam but it’s not possible to buy it. Fntastic themselves admit they don’t know what the future of the game will be, but for now the servers are still live.
Leaks on Reddit suggest the game sold 200,000 copies via Steam and has so far has had 91,000 refunds. Originally it cost £33, which is a staggering amount to waste on a game that was constantly being described as a scam.
How to get a The Day Before refund
The only good news about any of this is that at least it’s easy to get refunds through Steam. All you need to do is go to the Help section, click on Purchases and then choose The Day Before.
At this point, Steam is aware of the issues with the game, so it doesn’t really matter which problem you pick from the list but ‘Gameplay or technical issue’ is probably the most appropriate.
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