A reader summarises the debacle that has been the launch of The Day Before and suggests its problems aren’t as rare as you’d like to think.
A while back in 2021, a certain game was revealed: an MMO set in a post-apocalyptic city, drenched in Unreal Engine 5 goodness and sprinkled with zombies and co-op elements. Looked good… almost too good.
You know when there’s those pop-up ads that ask you to spin a wheel for a prize? And you miraculously get the newest and shiniest IPhone or a car or a TV? It’s a blatant fake, playing on those primitive instincts we have to gain ‘stuff’. But in a weird way, you can’t help but hope it’s real? The Day Before was like this, the only difference was we actually got the prize in question.
After an era of zombie saturation, it feels like people were hopeful for a DayZ killer, something to freshen up the genre and scratch that undead itch. And boy it was a dreadful mess: the game was built entirely out of assets from Epic Game’s webstore; was actually an extraction shooter, if you can call it even that; and was rife with more bugs than a Bethesda game at launch (and that’s saying something!).
It’s OK: I’m sure it’s fixable, right? Gaining IGN’s coveted ‘1’ rating and an array of angry buyers lead to the studio taking the game off Steam, due to a refund rate of around 50%. Despite having 200,000 sales it was deemed by the developers as a ‘financial failure’, despite Redditors estimating it costing around $1,000 in assets and free, voluntary work from freelance developers.
And with the game gone you may be now one of those unlucky few who are trying their hardest to obtain a refund at the moment; a little harder when the studio, Fntastic, has now apparently shut down entirely.
But not so quick cowboy, it seems that the company has instead thought that changing their name to Eight Points would remove the responsibility of having to follow up these refunds; the equivalent to putting on a fake moustache and glasses to be quite frank.
[They didn’t change their name to Eight Points, rather it was the publisher trying to disown any connection to Fntastic – GC]
The problem is, these manipulative and scummy tactics are rife within the gaming industry as it is, just to a lesser, more nuanced degree. It just took Fntastic’s brazen approach to ripping people off to lead to the possibility of a tangible punishment. It’s a shame we don’t get this kind of result when bigger, more established companies do this.
We’ve had Blizzard essentially sell you back an Overwatch 1 copy with Overwatch 2: The Store Update Edition and Battlefield 2042’s abysmal and broken launch, along with countless other examples in the last decade. I get these games don’t get made or maintained for free, especially with the plethora of layoffs at the moment in the gaming industry, but practices like this are egregious and dishonest, and way more common than they should be.
I’m sure as time goes on, we’ll see more revelations and rumours pop up, and it’s a rough time for those trying to get a refund at the moment. My immediate comment is, why the hell did you buy it besides for a joke? Guess that’s who those spin the wheel ads are targeted at… good luck!
By reader V
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