The Day Before

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

~ the goodbye ~

I did not buy The Day Before, and the window in which I could have was four days wide. For almost everyone outside that window the game was only ever an account of a game, and an account is the version I got. The thing itself was a multiplayer survival shooter set in a zombie-emptied American city called New Fortune City, built by a studio called Fntastic and published by Mytona.

Fntastic announced it on 29 January 2021. For the next three years what shipped was trailers. A release date of 21 June 2022 was set that October and abandoned the following May, with a switch from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 given as the reason and 1 March 2023 put up in its place. By then it was the most wishlisted game on Steam.

January 2023 took the Steam page down. On the 25th Fntastic said the title was caught in a trademark dispute and moved the release again, to 10 November. The claimant turned out to be the developer of a calendar app also called TheDayBefore, which got Fntastic's videos pulled off YouTube in February as well. Fntastic kept the name in the end and shipped under it, though it had quietly registered Dayworld in August as a spare.

The game went into early access on 7 December 2023 for Windows, at $39.99. On 11 December Fntastic announced it was closing, and Steam stopped selling the game about four hours later. The studio formally wound up on 22 December and arranged refunds for everyone who had bought it. The servers ran on without a company behind them until 22 January 2024.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the wishlist ~

The wishlist is what still does not sit right. The Day Before sat at number one on Steam's most wishlisted chart from May 2022, more than eighteen months before anyone could play it, on the strength of trailers whose scale and density the finished game never had. Valve never published a count and neither did Fntastic, so the only hard figure anyone has is the rank. It had been sold for years as a massively multiplayer game and arrived as an extraction shooter. A former developer told Eurogamer afterward that it was never intended to be an MMO at all.

~ four days ~

A capture of the Steam page from 8 December, the day after launch, already reads Overwhelmingly Negative, with 15 percent of 10,048 reviews positive. IGN scored it 1 out of 10 and called it wholly disappointing, easily one of the worst games it had ever played, while Ed Nightingale at Eurogamer wrote that the frame rate was appalling and the pop-in extensive, with the city feeling soulless. The player count fell by three quarters inside two days and by ninety percent inside four.

Fntastic's closing statement said the game had failed financially and that all remaining income was going toward debts to partners. It made a point of saying that no money had been taken from the public during development, since there had been no pre-orders and no crowdfunding, and it ended on a line about having miscalculated its own capabilities. Steam pulled the game from sale that evening, four days after it had gone on it.

~ who was fntastic ~

Fntastic was founded in 2015 by two brothers, Eduard and Aysen Gotovtsev, in Yakutsk. The legal entity by the end was Fntastic Pte Ltd in Singapore, though most of the staff stayed in Russia. The brothers had fronted the early trailers themselves, on camera, talking about reinventing everything from the in-game goals to the way they approached quality. Their earlier game, Propnight, had sold close to a million copies, and it lost its servers on the same January date this one did.

The volunteer story broke in June 2022, when Kotaku noticed that the studio's own website described its people as volunteers, some salaried and some not. The unpaid ones handled localization and moderation and were compensated with participation certificates and free game codes. Fntastic's answer was that volunteering there meant working willingly for a common cause, and that it considered everyone on the team a volunteer, employees included.

Three days after the closure notice, GameWorldObserver went through the Singapore filings. They showed roughly 2.6 million US dollars of revenue for 2022 and about 1.1 million dollars of cash on hand when that year closed, against a statement that said the studio lacked the funds to continue. Former developers later told PC Gamer and Eurogamer about crunch and about fines for bad work, though none of that has been tested anywhere except in print. In September 2024 the same name came back with an apology document and a Kickstarter for a game about factory workers escaping traps. It was canceled on 23 October 2024, and another new game was announced the same day.

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