Propnight

» see propnight.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 11 December 2023 Fntastic announced that it was closing. The studio said it had no funding left to continue, and in the same notice it said the servers for its two live games would remain operational. Ten days after that, Propnight was removed from sale on Steam. On 22 January 2024 the servers went off.

Propnight had shipped on 1 December 2021, four versus one asymmetrical horror for Windows. Four survivors work a set of seven machines and need five of them running to get the door open, while one killer hunts them across the map. The name comes from the trick at the center of it: survivors can turn into props, so a chair in the corner of a room is either a chair or a person who has been holding perfectly still for ninety seconds. Fntastic built it and Mytona published it, and both companies trace back to Yakutsk in the Russian far east.

It sold. Roughly 200,000 copies and close to three million dollars in the first month, and by Fntastic's own published figure more than 900,000 copies across its life. Reviews came in middling rather than hostile, three out of five from NME and six out of ten from MMOGames, and the recurring complaints were technical ones about framerate and about a motion blur implementation nobody could stand.

Then the studio spent two years on The Day Before, which entered early access on 7 December 2023 carrying 18.5 percent positive reviews and a marketing history that had promised an open-world survival MMO and shipped an extraction shooter. Four days after that launch Fntastic was finished, and Propnight went down with it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the promise on the way out ~

The closure notice is worth quoting for what it got wrong. "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 to work," it said, and then it told players the servers for both The Day Before and Propnight would stay up.

That gap between the statement and the outcome is the ordinary shape of a studio death rather than a lie. A company writing its own closure notice on a Monday does not necessarily know who will still be paying the hosting bill in February. The delisting came on 21 December and the servers followed on 22 January.

~ nine hundred thousand copies ~

Propnight is a clean data point about what a mid-sized multiplayer game is actually worth when the wheels come off. Nearly a million copies sold, somewhere between half a million and a million owners on Steam by the trackers' estimates, and none of it bought the game an extra week. The asset with value was the studio, and the studio had spent its Propnight money on The Day Before.

The Steam page is still standing. It carries one line: "Notice: Propnight is no longer available on the Steam store." Everything else on the page, the trailers and two years of user reviews, is intact around that sentence.

~ the funny part ~

Fntastic ran on what it publicly called volunteers. The studio described more than a hundred internal volunteers spread across seven countries and another forty external ones testing on a pro bono basis, and its founders defended the arrangement in public when people objected. Filings reported by Game World Observer put 2022 revenue at 2.6 million dollars, with 150,000 paid out to the two founding brothers and 230,000 spent on travel. The closure notice a year later framed the ending as a funding problem.

I did not play this one, for the ordinary reason: four-versus-one horror is a game you need five people free on the same Tuesday night to enjoy, and by thirty-seven that arrangement has quietly stopped being available. What I did follow from a distance was the Day Before story, which was the loudest thing in games that December. Propnight was the collateral, and outside its own player base almost nobody noticed it had been standing there at all.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »