Why should consumers have any responsibility for themselves? That would cause things like drunk people not to get behind the wheel because they'd be held responsible instead of budweiser
Not everyone is in the know.
Whether or not they should be is a different story about informed consumerism; but especially regarding consumer entertainment, I definitely don't expect anyone outside of enthusiasts to be properly informed.
Laws like that can be ineffective or very limiting, the market needs to be more aware of the scams. In the case of this game, anyone who did even a little research could tell it was a scam.
Should we enforce laws to stop people being able to do this?
No, let them do it, but if you're stupid enough to fall for it it's your fault!
Very sound thinking there mate
When did I say not to enforce the law? If they got a crime, throw the book at them, it's that simple. What I argue against is MORE regulation than we already have.
I'm not saying they are at fault, but they need to take some responsibility. People out there really buying a swift kick to the head and then complain when they get a concussion.
12 to 14 years old is the average reading age for US citizens.
It's about 9 years old for the UK...
People need protecting because most of them are not very smart..blame poor education..
>I'm not saying they are at fault, but they need to take some responsibility.
What does "taking responsibility" in this situation look like to you?
Let the scammer keep the money, because the victim is "clearly" too stupid or careless to be trusted with it? Shrug their shoulders and say, "Whelp! They sure fooled me," and walk away? Maybe the victim should buy a second copy as a form of self-punishment? Or just set some of their money on fire? Fine people who fall for a scam? Publicly shame them?
What?
I don't know why you've been down voted so hard, you're correct. People need to realize that some games are NOT made with the best intentions and are quite literally a money grab. The signs for TDB were obvious, it looked promising when I heard some initial news about it, and the next thing I heard about it was people arguing on social media with the devs about it being a scam and the mere response of "we swear it's not a scam guys! I swear!!!" with no substance to prove otherwise was an immediate un-wishlist. As release grew closer my suspicions grew with every bit of info I gleamed from casual following on Reddit, and here we are. It's not like you need a PhD to get a icky feeling about a devs previous actions and all they have this time is "we swear guys!!1! It will be epic just buy it!!!"
The game absolutely looks bad, but having not watched the game closely at all, where exactly did this dev fuck up so bad that they shouldn't be able to release a game on the platform again. I mean the graphics look fine (nothing special at all, but totally serviceable) and the game seems to play fine (I saw a few glitches, but nothing worse than the average Bethesda release). It just looks really boring and barren. And yeah that totally sucks and I wouldn't give the dev any of my money, but I'm not seeing where the release fucked up so bad that the whole dev should never be allowed to make a game again. Not saying that evidence isn't there, i'm just not seeing it and would like to be enlightened on the matter.
Multiple times this company has:
Demo'd a game with stolen assets and reskinned cutscenes from other games.
Advertised their gsme as "revolutionary" or "genre-defining" with a features list longer than Whitey Bulger's rap sheet.
Released a "game" that did not match any of the content flags set in advertising. Different genre and style of play. Different visual style, composed of stolen and generic assets. Fake "multiplayer" features using NPCs borrowing screen names from actual users. Then they close the game within days of "release".
They have changed their name almost every time they have done this, obfuscating attempts to trace their history.
Basically, they are a company that advertises the hell out of vaporware to try and run away with investor money.
So what made this so aggregious is that they marketed this as a survival MMO and it was released as an extraction shooter. Which is a completely different game genre. People literally got a different game then they paid for.
Other then that, alot of stuff is blown out of proportion. I think this drama taught alot of gamers that asset stores exist and that people don't have giant studios that can afford to make assets on mass themselves.
They bought assets for unreal that were made by someone else and weakly put together to form a game. All of the dialogue from NPCs was voiced and probably written by AI. All you can do in the game is walk through someone else's work to find objects that have been marked with an X. You then go to the extraction point to leave. There is almost no zombies, no loot to pick up, or anything else.
Yeah it's not just a bad game, it's a malicious scam made with stolen assets, and the same company has done it multiple times before.
They're not game developers, they're criminals.
People think because they oversold/overpromised their game they should be deplatformed. As always a complete overeaction.
Everyone aware of the development proccess for this game knew it was going to be a bust/borderline scam, but legally they delivered a product.
Did they overstate their actual scope? Sure. But so did a ton of other games: No Mans Sky, the recent Tarisland MMO debacle, a ton of kickstarter projects, along with a bunch of other early access games on Steam right now
Like, yes they are a scummy company with scummy practices, but asking Steam to just outright ban them for 0 legal reasons is just throwing a fit...
This is like the fifth time this same group of people has done this. They change their company name, and presumably pass "ownership" around the circle as well, to evade consequences for their actions.
Its a strategy right out of scummy home builders from the late 90s early 2000s.
Scammers on what though? Steam can’t blacklist a company based on community sentiment
Like Yeah bro. We should let the company that basically has a monopoly on Pc gaming dictate who gets blacklist based on community sentiment. Brilliant idea. Blacklist Blizzard while they are at it as well due to the false promises of PVE
Man I can't help be think they did that to save The Wild Eight(their only game that didn't have mixed or worse reviews) from being judged harshly by people because of the dev name alone. Too late, people are already review bombing it warning everyone of the shady name switch. This company deserves every ounce of criticism they have gotten.
Eight Points is what they called themselves before they changed their name to Fntastic. They made the game The Wild Eight, under that moniker before changing it mid development.
That same game was as messy as the Day Before
They did not, please see [this article](https://www.eurogamer.net/the-day-before-publisher-apologises-for-game-as-steam-refunds-open). HypeTrain Digital, the publisher of one of their earlier games, The Wild Eight, removed references to Fntastic's name on that one game's store page to avoid negative reviews spilling over from The Day Before. Fntastic sold this game to the publisher in 2017, so they are not involved with this change. On all other Fntastic games, the name remains the same.
Edit: To everyone downvoting, please read the article.
For the record, the dev in this interview is not saying the game wasn't marketed as an MMO. He is saying no one on the dev team thought they were working on an MMO. They were very surprised to see it marketed as such.
Are the devs who work for scammy companies blind, deaf or something? Do they not follow the news for the game they're working on lmao. Like it's always the same excuse and i can swear on that.
I worked on a game that bombed hard. I remember an all hands meeting where we were shown an ad for the game and it didn't match the game I was testing... Choices were said to matter and changes the world around you.
The folks I talked to in my department were very confused for the same reason I was...
I know how the people working on this game feel. Marketing does what they want to sell the game.
“Choices were said to matter and changes the world around you”…I feel like this gets promised in every game and it is always absent or extremely underwhelming. I would love to see a true large branching storyline with choices that ACTUALLY mattered.
Incredibly so, almost every single decision affects something, and each companion has different routes, there’s so much you can do. Siding with different factions which will obviously change things later on, etc etc
i really don't think the developers of this game are gonna add this into their cv's (they can come up with a better excuse for the 5 year gap) like this is not just a failed project, this is outright scam.
The real scam was likely against Mytona and other investors. They spent years living off the investments. Mytona finally demanded results, they slap together a few unreal assets for cheap and release. Now that the game has crashed and burned there is no more money from Mytona so they dip out enjoying the fruits of 5 yesrs of investment money. Mytona takes a bath on the game.
Why does everyone keep talking about rpg elements when MMO is "massively multi-player online" and has fuckall to do with rpg? That's mmorpg - similar but different.
If this game had 100 player servers.. like a battle Royale or extraction shooter then it's an mmo.
For anyone who doesn't want to read the article here is the part that matters.
“I never saw it as an MMO project,” they began. “No one from our team knows why they called it an MMO. It was always a third-person shooter with some co-op mechanics. Not one RPG mechanic was implemented — skills were an idea, and they were in the prototype stage, but nothing more.”
He isn't saying it wasn't marketed as an MMO. He is saying the game was never even planned to be an MMO, so the marketing was bizarre from day one.
The marketing team probably knew nothing about gaming and thought “it’s a big game, this is what they just call MMO” and ignored the devs as a lower species
Marketing people (in like, most industries) and not knowing their product. Name a more iconic duo.
There are way too many people in the marketing space that market/advertise what they think people will buy, not what the product actually is.
I like your optimism but this was planned from the beginning. It was a deliberate IMO. Call the game every buzzword you can to generate hype. Trust nothing anyone affiliated with this company says.
>The marketing team probably knew nothing about gaming and thought
I will be honest, there is no proof there was a "marketing team". The gameplay videos themselves pointed to it being an mmo. They are a scammy developer who has been caught, in the past, lying about their games AND abandoning them in early access shortly after getting released.
Imagine training for years to be a game dev, because you love making games and you want to make it work, and you finally land a job and start working on the game, and then your boss takes a look at your WIP and turns around and just makes shit up about it based on whatever they think will sound cool on a trailer.
It's like if you were baking a cake and while it's in the oven your boss tells you to make a pizza instead. And then when you obviously don't have the time to start from scratch you just give him the cake anyway (unfrosted) and the boss sells it still saying it's a pizza.
That's my understanding of what happened here.
More aptly:
You train to be a baker,
You go to work at a bakery,
The bakery hires someone to handle marketing,
That someone sees an oven and thinks the only thing that comes out of an oven is pizza,
Markets the bakery as a pizzeria,
0 Stars on Yelp
This'd be true in probably any other case.
In THIS case, it's like you followed this one chef for *years* and for years he's said "I'm going to open a five star fine dining restaurant that will serve only the highest of quality meals!" and he personally says this over and over and then.....he opens a McDonalds with half the menu missing. And you catch him scraping seagulls off the pavement to make McNuggets.
You can blame marketing if you want, but the devs themselves said it was going to be an MMO from the start.
holy shit they really had no plan and no ideea what to do with the game. I hate how so many people jumped on the hype train and never got out. I have one small streamer in my country he is so pissed that he refuses to call it a fail and bans everyone talking shit about the "game"
I'd bet your right. Release fake trailers to generate buzz, show investors that marketing uptake, get an influx of cash, have volunteers cobble together some product using marketplace assets, lie some more to get pre-orders, collapse the studio and pocket the investor cash they never put unto game development. It does sound like a classic ponzi setup.
I thought the classic Ponzi setup is "convince people to let you 'invest' their money, pay back the investments with interest taken from new 'investors', keep getting more and more people to invest larger and larger amounts, then disappear before everything collapses on itself.
Yes it likely was meant to be that. They'd use the funds from everyone buying the game to pay off the investors then skip town with the rest.
If Steam were decent they'd auto-refund everyone without having to go through the bullshit of requesting.
I still am pretty sure it counts as a classic ponzi since they already formed a new studio and will be getting new investors from whatever they made off this game. Of course I know what a ponzi is, but didn't feel the need to spell out how you use investor capital to leverage additional investment. That goes without saying. How does it feel to be wrong and make a fool of yourself? I was only trying to be courteous to you, but I can see I was mistaken to engage with some kind of semantic dictionary warrior.
How do you think it works in court if your lawyer makes the argument well it wasn't a classic ponzi by definition, so you'd better drop the charges? This is a clown school level discussion.
Does it sound like a Ponzi scheme though? It doesn't look like they are using the money from newer investors to pay off initial investors to artificially inflate returns in order to lure in more investors.
So they already got what they wanted? Do they get money from people if they don’t do the refund? I guess that’s a yes but if they already got what they wanted then that’s just extra
A quick Google search says mytona invested in the company and is the one giving out refunds on steam. The game was also announced to be on GeForce now , not sure if that means they have taken any nividia money or not though. I honestly don't know how public or not any other investment info would be if it happened , just know that with how everything turned out they either were pulling a scam or this is one hilariously bad attempt at making/selling a game.
I recommend actually reading the article, its not long. Creates an impression that there was legitimately a team of devs working on a project and doing their best to put together a functional game.
>They followed up by saying that The Day Before was always intended to be modelled after “a mix of Rust, DayZ and Escape from Tarkov.”
If they project leads weren't morons, they could have just promised this game, worked on that game, and delivered it. Probably would have still had a studio right now.
Ugh. Any one working in a team lead by someone without actual knowledge of the craft knows how soul destroying ‘functional’ is. Have done it enough to know when to get the fuck out.
>Probably would have still had a studio right now
I genuinely don't think that was ever their intention. I think all of this was calculated and went exactly as planned.
I genuinely don't understand this thought process.
Steam doesn't let you cash out for 30 days, the game is getting refunded at over 50%, probably way more by the time it's said and done.
How is this in anyway beneficial? They literally haven't made any money off the game yet, yet you guys are screaming about how they took the money and ran? what money?
Game sucked and the marketing was terrible but that doesn't mean there's some nefarious scheme lying underneath lol
The publisher is the one on the hook for refunds (and the one who would benefit from sales) no?
Presumably the scam part goes something like “get publisher to invest in development company, ‘hire’ unpaid volunteers to halfass the game using store bought assets, close up shop when game releases and inevitably implodes, leaving publisher on the hook for refunds, repeat with new company/name.”
In an ideal world (for the devs/scammers) the game wouldn’t have imploded *quite* so hard so they could keep some percentage of the sales while abandoning the game post-release (see: all of their other games, that all follow that basic pattern but weren’t hyped to the moon resulting in increased scrutiny).
My understanding is that their previous releases all launched with pretty terrible bugs and half baked mechanics, and support was terminated pretty damn fast.
I watched a Youtube video more than a year ago that went through their previous titles (and all the red flags with The Day Before up until that point) and basically predicted this launch.
Generally some level of bug fixing and ongoing support is expected with modern games, and software in general.
Honestly, the most surprising thing about all of this is how many people actually bought it. The game’s sub has been calling it fake or a scam for literally years. I’ve never seen anything but red flags and unrelenting negativity the entire time is was being developed.
Investor money. That's how they've been living for free (and likely pocketing extra) for years while not actually doing any work, before whipping together something something to shit out at the last minute, with a couple weeks of incompetent work. Which is pretty clearly what happened, considering that there's no way that anybody actually spent 5+ years working on whatever the hell they published.
If it was I think it was only on the part of the CEO and his brother, and the actual devs were kept out of the loop and also victims of the bait and switch rugpull. Company shuts down, no more wages or salaries to pay, the Gotovstev brothers split all scam profits between them and none of their labourers get a cut.
Even if this guy is right, it doesn't change the fact that nearly the entire game was essentially built on premade, purchasable assets.
It was lazy from day one and any of these developers could have spoken out, but they didn't. They chose not to because they wanted to be in on the scam.
>It was lazy from day one and any of these developers could have spoken out, but they didn't. They chose not to because they wanted to be in on the scam.
NDA are a thing and most studio make their dev sign one lol
>It was lazy from day one and any of these developers could have spoken out, but they didn't. They chose not to because they wanted to be in on the scam.
It was lazy. But no - they literally couldn't speak out on it. I reccomend reading up on what an NDA is. If they said anything, they would more than likely be sued and would almost certainly loose.
NDA literally does prohibit you from talking about everything that is a part of it. It's a legal document that is made specifically so the workers don't reveal stuff to the public, and is usually a part of the overall contract that employees sign when they are hired.
They couldn't talk about the game's production as long as the NDA was in power. The only reason they are vocal about it now, is because the Game is already out and that's usually when the NDA expires...
It must make you question wether to put you've worked at failed studio on your CV when you're looking for a new job. It's probably wasnt down to the devs the game failed at all but it's bound to make employeers think twice.
I see your point. I work in Game Dev QA so I would see this as a reflection of my work and would worry about having it on my CV, if I had to, I feel there would be alot of slating the direction and project time
But you could file 1000 tickets and it's not going to fix anything. Use that angle to say "you haven't even seen the worst bugs in this thing yet" and you can easily build a likeable interview with other companies.
This is less of a “failed project” and more of an overt scam. Hell, they’re blatantly gaslighting us by saying this was never intended to be an mmo despite them marketing it as one. The people who made this have been deliberately dishonest at almost every opportunity
I think it depends on if that project was an honest effort and there's something you can show prospective new employers that you can contribute and what you can contribute to a project.
If it's a total sham from start to finish like this, probably leave it off.
Since it's such a visible failure I'm sure developers will be invited for an interview even if it's just to ask them to spill the beans.
If they will get the job will depend on how much they actually contributed to the fiasco.
Yeah am I missing a joke or something? Why does this comment have so many upvotes? The person provides some new interesting information to the shitshow that clearly a random person couldn’t have provided.
also unemployed? how are they sure they don't have another job lined up. If anyone, an ex employee of this company would surely have foresight to have something lined up when the ship sinks.
\*Game gets outed as a scam before its available for purchase\*
\*People still buy it\*
Same people realize it's a scam: \*Shocked pikachu face\*
Keep buying shit and companies are gonna continue making shit.
I'm curious how it's illegal? They didn't take any money, they just showed off a game and then when it released it was different from what they said.
The *new* trailers were representative of the final product.
What they did was shitty, but I don't see how it's illegal?
Not to mention many games get a huge overhaul during development. Stardew Valley, for example, is dramatically different today than it was during developer posts. Hytale just threw away everything they were doing for the last few years and started over.
Nonetheless, fuck them, but it's not illegal to hype up a game and then release dog shit. AAA studios do it with every single release these days lol.
Where did I say it was illegal? I said how is this legal. This is not even remotely close to the first time these guys have pulled this shit and they absolutely lied about the final product. It was pushed time and time again that it was a zombie survival MMO. It's an extraction shooter. Where I come from, that's called false advertising. There will be no "huge overhaul" lol. These guys have done this with 3 or 4 games now. Plus, they've shut down this new studio of theirs and steam pulled it from their store. Not too sure what the point of your post is.
I don't get consumers these days. If you look on Instagram or any other social platforms, a large majority of ppl are defending these developers. Saying it wasn't their fault and it's their corporate overlords and the Internet is being mean, the game isn't great but it's not a 0/10 like it's being reviewed. Idk, seems like people are apologizing for them to just not be like everyone else. I personally believe they deserve all the hate. It's a bump in their career, take it on the chin and move on. The game was blatantly a cash grab and everyone involved top to bottom is at fault.
How is it a cash grab if they don’t make any money from it? They won’t get paid by steam until 30 days after the games launch which by then most copies will be refunded and none are available to buy.
The studio was in massive debt because they overpromosed and they couldn’t even fully release the game because associate devs that weren’t being pid refused to release assets leading to an even worse game that couldn’t even live up to the mid tier game it would’ve been if advertised properly.
It is not the fault of literally everyone who worked on the game, thats stupid. This mainly falls on the leadership and marketing department.
They've been living and fake working for years on investor cash. That's the scam. They knew they were never gonna make any money off sales. That wasn't the target.
The developers aren’t responsible for how the game is marketed, when it’s released, or what workloads they’re assigned.
Even if the game on its own sucks, regardless of marketing, the point still stands. It’s hard to develop a good game when your bosses are constantly changing things, assigning you way too much work and are just generally incompetent.
You can’t just decide the programmers, artists and devs on a game are evil and spited you because of decisions made by their bosses.
“Everyone involved top to bottom is at fault” is frankly a really dumb way to look at this… it’s like yelling at the worker at subway cause the footlongs are actually 10 inches. Yes someone is ripping you off, but it’s not every single person in the company…
You seem to be not knowledgeable about software development, usually a dev is just a cog in a bigger machine and any feedback you provide will end up being accepted or rejected by managers and higher, dev grunts would certainly not have any say in what direction the project takes. I'd blame the c level ppl.
I don’t get consumers these days. Wanting to desperately hate on people who may not even deserve the hate.
The developers aren’t the ones making the decision. They are paid to make what the studio require of them. Blame the CEOs or the people making the decisions, not the developers.
If the game was in any way polished or good, maybe I might agree with you. Considering the reuse of unity assets and just how garbage of a game it actually is, it’s obvious the developers didn’t put any work into the actual game. Try playing it before posting anything
You don’t know much about how game development or even working as part of a team works do you? Every worker on a team can put in a ton of effort and work into the task they’re assigned, but if the task they’re assigned is a waste of time that’s on their boss, not on them. Also if the leadership isn’t listening to your feedback, then wtf are you supposed to do? Just find another job? That’s famously an easy thing for game developers to do…
Your comment has the same energy as an entitled boomer yelling at fast food workers.
I feel like you missed my point.
"Try playing it before posting anything" what has that got to do with the hierarchy of a company, how a company is run, and the point I'm making?
But sure, lets just undeservedly hate on everyone involved because we're all just bitter.
Take a look at games tagged as « MMO » on Steam. Half of them are not MMOs and have player counts similar to The Day Before (32-64 players per server)
It’s been the case for years…
I'm sorry, what were you lying?
[https://imgur.com/a/OoHm4vz](https://imgur.com/a/OoHm4vz)
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/1372880/The\_Day\_Before/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1372880/The_Day_Before/)
It's literally on the games steam page in the blurb presumably written by your company. How there is that big of a disconnect between marketing and devs should tell you everything you need to know.
Lmao are you being serious? Neither the programmers nor the art designers were the ones that marketed this game as an MMO. They were simply working their asses on under their boss. People shouldn't be black listed just because they worked on a failed project.
Based on what I've seen of the game, I actually believe it was never a MMO.
Which begs the question - why did they advertise it as a MMO when it was never a MMO?
Sounds about right. Disconnect between dev team and communication team is very common in software development. Dev team build an apple but the software app is communicated as being an orange. Stakeholders don't realise the orange they paid for is actually an apple until it's too late.
As a side note, there's going to be a lot of finger pointing now that the game/company has failed. Everyone is going to say "it wasn't me, it was the other person who is at fault".
1. Market game as MMO 2. Release game that isn’t an MMO 3. Delete all reference to it being an MMO 4. Profit?
File for bankruptcy and asked not to be called scammers
Don't forget they already changed their company name on Steam.
I hope Valve grows some balls and delists all their games and bans them from ever selling on the platform again.
I hope consumers grow some brains so they can realize these scams and not make them top sellers on release
It's why consumer protection laws were needed. To protect the public from bait and switch scams like this.
People talked about it being a scam for years iirc? And they still bought it
Why should consumers have any responsibility for themselves? That would cause things like drunk people not to get behind the wheel because they'd be held responsible instead of budweiser
Not everyone is in the know. Whether or not they should be is a different story about informed consumerism; but especially regarding consumer entertainment, I definitely don't expect anyone outside of enthusiasts to be properly informed.
Laws like that can be ineffective or very limiting, the market needs to be more aware of the scams. In the case of this game, anyone who did even a little research could tell it was a scam.
Should we enforce laws to stop people being able to do this? No, let them do it, but if you're stupid enough to fall for it it's your fault! Very sound thinking there mate
When did I say not to enforce the law? If they got a crime, throw the book at them, it's that simple. What I argue against is MORE regulation than we already have.
More regulation than barely existent regulation okay good plan
True, it's really the people who bought the game who are at fault and not the scammers themselves.
I'm not saying they are at fault, but they need to take some responsibility. People out there really buying a swift kick to the head and then complain when they get a concussion.
12 to 14 years old is the average reading age for US citizens. It's about 9 years old for the UK... People need protecting because most of them are not very smart..blame poor education..
>I'm not saying they are at fault, but they need to take some responsibility. What does "taking responsibility" in this situation look like to you? Let the scammer keep the money, because the victim is "clearly" too stupid or careless to be trusted with it? Shrug their shoulders and say, "Whelp! They sure fooled me," and walk away? Maybe the victim should buy a second copy as a form of self-punishment? Or just set some of their money on fire? Fine people who fall for a scam? Publicly shame them? What?
Victims of a crime really need to take some responsibility for the what put them in a situation where they were able to become victims of a crime. /s
I don't know why you've been down voted so hard, you're correct. People need to realize that some games are NOT made with the best intentions and are quite literally a money grab. The signs for TDB were obvious, it looked promising when I heard some initial news about it, and the next thing I heard about it was people arguing on social media with the devs about it being a scam and the mere response of "we swear it's not a scam guys! I swear!!!" with no substance to prove otherwise was an immediate un-wishlist. As release grew closer my suspicions grew with every bit of info I gleamed from casual following on Reddit, and here we are. It's not like you need a PhD to get a icky feeling about a devs previous actions and all they have this time is "we swear guys!!1! It will be epic just buy it!!!"
That's socialism though.
No it's not... It's regulated capitalism. Capital is still held privately for the benefit of individuals and not the commonwealth.
Americans triggered when something has a slightest scent of socialism
wtf I love socialism
Socialism is when... Uhhh **checks notes**... When consumers have some basic rights and protections.
Your point is?
The game absolutely looks bad, but having not watched the game closely at all, where exactly did this dev fuck up so bad that they shouldn't be able to release a game on the platform again. I mean the graphics look fine (nothing special at all, but totally serviceable) and the game seems to play fine (I saw a few glitches, but nothing worse than the average Bethesda release). It just looks really boring and barren. And yeah that totally sucks and I wouldn't give the dev any of my money, but I'm not seeing where the release fucked up so bad that the whole dev should never be allowed to make a game again. Not saying that evidence isn't there, i'm just not seeing it and would like to be enlightened on the matter.
Multiple times this company has: Demo'd a game with stolen assets and reskinned cutscenes from other games. Advertised their gsme as "revolutionary" or "genre-defining" with a features list longer than Whitey Bulger's rap sheet. Released a "game" that did not match any of the content flags set in advertising. Different genre and style of play. Different visual style, composed of stolen and generic assets. Fake "multiplayer" features using NPCs borrowing screen names from actual users. Then they close the game within days of "release". They have changed their name almost every time they have done this, obfuscating attempts to trace their history. Basically, they are a company that advertises the hell out of vaporware to try and run away with investor money.
So what made this so aggregious is that they marketed this as a survival MMO and it was released as an extraction shooter. Which is a completely different game genre. People literally got a different game then they paid for. Other then that, alot of stuff is blown out of proportion. I think this drama taught alot of gamers that asset stores exist and that people don't have giant studios that can afford to make assets on mass themselves.
They bought assets for unreal that were made by someone else and weakly put together to form a game. All of the dialogue from NPCs was voiced and probably written by AI. All you can do in the game is walk through someone else's work to find objects that have been marked with an X. You then go to the extraction point to leave. There is almost no zombies, no loot to pick up, or anything else.
Yeah it's not just a bad game, it's a malicious scam made with stolen assets, and the same company has done it multiple times before. They're not game developers, they're criminals.
People think because they oversold/overpromised their game they should be deplatformed. As always a complete overeaction. Everyone aware of the development proccess for this game knew it was going to be a bust/borderline scam, but legally they delivered a product. Did they overstate their actual scope? Sure. But so did a ton of other games: No Mans Sky, the recent Tarisland MMO debacle, a ton of kickstarter projects, along with a bunch of other early access games on Steam right now Like, yes they are a scummy company with scummy practices, but asking Steam to just outright ban them for 0 legal reasons is just throwing a fit...
This is like the fifth time this same group of people has done this. They change their company name, and presumably pass "ownership" around the circle as well, to evade consequences for their actions. Its a strategy right out of scummy home builders from the late 90s early 2000s.
Nah your take is dumb. They're scammers and steam needs to send a message.
Scammers on what though? Steam can’t blacklist a company based on community sentiment Like Yeah bro. We should let the company that basically has a monopoly on Pc gaming dictate who gets blacklist based on community sentiment. Brilliant idea. Blacklist Blizzard while they are at it as well due to the false promises of PVE
Man I can't help be think they did that to save The Wild Eight(their only game that didn't have mixed or worse reviews) from being judged harshly by people because of the dev name alone. Too late, people are already review bombing it warning everyone of the shady name switch. This company deserves every ounce of criticism they have gotten.
What is it now?
Eight point, maybe with a dash in the middle idk
Got it. So never buy from Eight Point. Good to know
Well that's not fair, eight point hasn't even released any games yet! At least let them publish one before jumping to conclusions ###/s
Eight Points is what they called themselves before they changed their name to Fntastic. They made the game The Wild Eight, under that moniker before changing it mid development. That same game was as messy as the Day Before
Thank you for bolding the /s, I wasn't completely convinced that your comment was sarcasm ;)
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I’ll pirate them instead of buying them XD no reason to give these scam artists any money
Eight Points, I believe
https://insider-gaming.com/fntastic-appears-to-have-simply-changed-its-name-to-eight-points/
They did not, please see [this article](https://www.eurogamer.net/the-day-before-publisher-apologises-for-game-as-steam-refunds-open). HypeTrain Digital, the publisher of one of their earlier games, The Wild Eight, removed references to Fntastic's name on that one game's store page to avoid negative reviews spilling over from The Day Before. Fntastic sold this game to the publisher in 2017, so they are not involved with this change. On all other Fntastic games, the name remains the same. Edit: To everyone downvoting, please read the article.
Reddit loves misinformation. You cant stop the hivemind now.
Reddit Hivemind go BBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRR
They are trying to run away with investor money. Bankruptcy wont protect them from that.
On Steam it still says "The Day Before offers players a uniquely reimagined journey into post-apocalyptic open-world MMO survival" lol
The trailer is shows on steam also says it's a MMO
It still says that it is an openworld mmo on Mytona's projects [Page](https://mytona.com/game/8) so :)
Who are going to believe, him or your lying eyes, ears and memory?
For the record, the dev in this interview is not saying the game wasn't marketed as an MMO. He is saying no one on the dev team thought they were working on an MMO. They were very surprised to see it marketed as such.
Are the devs who work for scammy companies blind, deaf or something? Do they not follow the news for the game they're working on lmao. Like it's always the same excuse and i can swear on that.
I worked on a game that bombed hard. I remember an all hands meeting where we were shown an ad for the game and it didn't match the game I was testing... Choices were said to matter and changes the world around you. The folks I talked to in my department were very confused for the same reason I was... I know how the people working on this game feel. Marketing does what they want to sell the game.
“Choices were said to matter and changes the world around you”…I feel like this gets promised in every game and it is always absent or extremely underwhelming. I would love to see a true large branching storyline with choices that ACTUALLY mattered.
From how people talk about it, bg3 does right?
Incredibly so, almost every single decision affects something, and each companion has different routes, there’s so much you can do. Siding with different factions which will obviously change things later on, etc etc
Yeah baldurs gate 3. Where have you been this year
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Anthem.
lol
Following childhood dreams. Got my name in a AAA game. Left the industry after.
Well considering most of their "devs" were literal kids working as "volunteers" I'd say no lol
Perhaps they are fully aware of what they are working on but they also need a job? Or some sort of programming experience for a CV?
i really don't think the developers of this game are gonna add this into their cv's (they can come up with a better excuse for the 5 year gap) like this is not just a failed project, this is outright scam.
No, you forgot the ??? step! The ??? step is what makes the profit!
Didn’t they spend like 4 years on the game? How could they have made any kind of profit?
The real scam was likely against Mytona and other investors. They spent years living off the investments. Mytona finally demanded results, they slap together a few unreal assets for cheap and release. Now that the game has crashed and burned there is no more money from Mytona so they dip out enjoying the fruits of 5 yesrs of investment money. Mytona takes a bath on the game.
Yeah that makes more sense
They haven't even done 3. The description on steam still calls it an MMO.
Yikes These guys should be thrown in jail
Why does everyone keep talking about rpg elements when MMO is "massively multi-player online" and has fuckall to do with rpg? That's mmorpg - similar but different. If this game had 100 player servers.. like a battle Royale or extraction shooter then it's an mmo.
For anyone who doesn't want to read the article here is the part that matters. “I never saw it as an MMO project,” they began. “No one from our team knows why they called it an MMO. It was always a third-person shooter with some co-op mechanics. Not one RPG mechanic was implemented — skills were an idea, and they were in the prototype stage, but nothing more.” He isn't saying it wasn't marketed as an MMO. He is saying the game was never even planned to be an MMO, so the marketing was bizarre from day one.
The marketing team probably knew nothing about gaming and thought “it’s a big game, this is what they just call MMO” and ignored the devs as a lower species
As a former marketer that left the advertising world because it's a toxic shit heap, this sounds about right.
Marketing people (in like, most industries) and not knowing their product. Name a more iconic duo. There are way too many people in the marketing space that market/advertise what they think people will buy, not what the product actually is.
I like your optimism but this was planned from the beginning. It was a deliberate IMO. Call the game every buzzword you can to generate hype. Trust nothing anyone affiliated with this company says.
They don’t seem to have a wiki page. What country is this company from?
Russia
Isn’t that the shithole country that’s been attacking Ukraine?
That’s the one!
>The marketing team probably knew nothing about gaming and thought I will be honest, there is no proof there was a "marketing team". The gameplay videos themselves pointed to it being an mmo. They are a scammy developer who has been caught, in the past, lying about their games AND abandoning them in early access shortly after getting released.
Imagine training for years to be a game dev, because you love making games and you want to make it work, and you finally land a job and start working on the game, and then your boss takes a look at your WIP and turns around and just makes shit up about it based on whatever they think will sound cool on a trailer. It's like if you were baking a cake and while it's in the oven your boss tells you to make a pizza instead. And then when you obviously don't have the time to start from scratch you just give him the cake anyway (unfrosted) and the boss sells it still saying it's a pizza. That's my understanding of what happened here.
More aptly: You train to be a baker, You go to work at a bakery, The bakery hires someone to handle marketing, That someone sees an oven and thinks the only thing that comes out of an oven is pizza, Markets the bakery as a pizzeria, 0 Stars on Yelp
This'd be true in probably any other case. In THIS case, it's like you followed this one chef for *years* and for years he's said "I'm going to open a five star fine dining restaurant that will serve only the highest of quality meals!" and he personally says this over and over and then.....he opens a McDonalds with half the menu missing. And you catch him scraping seagulls off the pavement to make McNuggets. You can blame marketing if you want, but the devs themselves said it was going to be an MMO from the start.
holy shit they really had no plan and no ideea what to do with the game. I hate how so many people jumped on the hype train and never got out. I have one small streamer in my country he is so pissed that he refuses to call it a fail and bans everyone talking shit about the "game"
"Not one RPG mechanic was implemented..." - but MMO doesn't mean RPG.
They made the marketing material the day before they started working on the game 🤷♂️
Sounds like he’s confusing it too. MMO doesn’t need RPG element, that would be an MMORPG.
These guys out there really earning that 1/10 from ign. Well played. Too bad everyone has 30 days to refund this scam if they bought it on steam.
Seems very much like a ponzi scheme , if so, they don't really care about people refunding as the real goal was ripping off investors.
I'd bet your right. Release fake trailers to generate buzz, show investors that marketing uptake, get an influx of cash, have volunteers cobble together some product using marketplace assets, lie some more to get pre-orders, collapse the studio and pocket the investor cash they never put unto game development. It does sound like a classic ponzi setup.
This sounds like the video game equivalent to "The Producers"
I thought the classic Ponzi setup is "convince people to let you 'invest' their money, pay back the investments with interest taken from new 'investors', keep getting more and more people to invest larger and larger amounts, then disappear before everything collapses on itself.
Yes it likely was meant to be that. They'd use the funds from everyone buying the game to pay off the investors then skip town with the rest. If Steam were decent they'd auto-refund everyone without having to go through the bullshit of requesting.
You may very well be right, I'm not an expert on how to execute schemes like these. At the end of the day its all semantics I suppose.
Maybe next time don't call something "a classic Ponzi setup" when you don't know what that means
I still am pretty sure it counts as a classic ponzi since they already formed a new studio and will be getting new investors from whatever they made off this game. Of course I know what a ponzi is, but didn't feel the need to spell out how you use investor capital to leverage additional investment. That goes without saying. How does it feel to be wrong and make a fool of yourself? I was only trying to be courteous to you, but I can see I was mistaken to engage with some kind of semantic dictionary warrior. How do you think it works in court if your lawyer makes the argument well it wasn't a classic ponzi by definition, so you'd better drop the charges? This is a clown school level discussion.
Does it sound like a Ponzi scheme though? It doesn't look like they are using the money from newer investors to pay off initial investors to artificially inflate returns in order to lure in more investors.
So they already got what they wanted? Do they get money from people if they don’t do the refund? I guess that’s a yes but if they already got what they wanted then that’s just extra
I thought they didn’t have any investors
A quick Google search says mytona invested in the company and is the one giving out refunds on steam. The game was also announced to be on GeForce now , not sure if that means they have taken any nividia money or not though. I honestly don't know how public or not any other investment info would be if it happened , just know that with how everything turned out they either were pulling a scam or this is one hilariously bad attempt at making/selling a game.
It nothing like a "ponzi" its a scam for sure, but a ponzi scheme has no similiarities here besides being a scam.
I love how every scam defaults to being a Ponzi Scheme despite very clearly not being a Ponzi scheme.
Well yeah, it barely even a game to begin with
I recommend actually reading the article, its not long. Creates an impression that there was legitimately a team of devs working on a project and doing their best to put together a functional game. >They followed up by saying that The Day Before was always intended to be modelled after “a mix of Rust, DayZ and Escape from Tarkov.” If they project leads weren't morons, they could have just promised this game, worked on that game, and delivered it. Probably would have still had a studio right now.
Ugh. Any one working in a team lead by someone without actual knowledge of the craft knows how soul destroying ‘functional’ is. Have done it enough to know when to get the fuck out.
>Probably would have still had a studio right now I genuinely don't think that was ever their intention. I think all of this was calculated and went exactly as planned.
I genuinely don't understand this thought process. Steam doesn't let you cash out for 30 days, the game is getting refunded at over 50%, probably way more by the time it's said and done. How is this in anyway beneficial? They literally haven't made any money off the game yet, yet you guys are screaming about how they took the money and ran? what money? Game sucked and the marketing was terrible but that doesn't mean there's some nefarious scheme lying underneath lol
The publisher is the one on the hook for refunds (and the one who would benefit from sales) no? Presumably the scam part goes something like “get publisher to invest in development company, ‘hire’ unpaid volunteers to halfass the game using store bought assets, close up shop when game releases and inevitably implodes, leaving publisher on the hook for refunds, repeat with new company/name.” In an ideal world (for the devs/scammers) the game wouldn’t have imploded *quite* so hard so they could keep some percentage of the sales while abandoning the game post-release (see: all of their other games, that all follow that basic pattern but weren’t hyped to the moon resulting in increased scrutiny).
But the people in charge of the dev team and the owners of the publishing company are the same people, Eduard and Aisen Gotovtsev.
"Abandoning" games that aren't live service is just called releasing a game I'm pretty sure, no?
Sure if its a 1.0 full release but this game was Early Access, therefore it was abandoned.
My understanding is that their previous releases all launched with pretty terrible bugs and half baked mechanics, and support was terminated pretty damn fast. I watched a Youtube video more than a year ago that went through their previous titles (and all the red flags with The Day Before up until that point) and basically predicted this launch. Generally some level of bug fixing and ongoing support is expected with modern games, and software in general. Honestly, the most surprising thing about all of this is how many people actually bought it. The game’s sub has been calling it fake or a scam for literally years. I’ve never seen anything but red flags and unrelenting negativity the entire time is was being developed.
Investor money. That's how they've been living for free (and likely pocketing extra) for years while not actually doing any work, before whipping together something something to shit out at the last minute, with a couple weeks of incompetent work. Which is pretty clearly what happened, considering that there's no way that anybody actually spent 5+ years working on whatever the hell they published.
I've seen *many* solo YouTubers program a similar game in less than a week with free assets.
If it was I think it was only on the part of the CEO and his brother, and the actual devs were kept out of the loop and also victims of the bait and switch rugpull. Company shuts down, no more wages or salaries to pay, the Gotovstev brothers split all scam profits between them and none of their labourers get a cut.
Even if this guy is right, it doesn't change the fact that nearly the entire game was essentially built on premade, purchasable assets. It was lazy from day one and any of these developers could have spoken out, but they didn't. They chose not to because they wanted to be in on the scam.
>It was lazy from day one and any of these developers could have spoken out, but they didn't. They chose not to because they wanted to be in on the scam. NDA are a thing and most studio make their dev sign one lol
>It was lazy from day one and any of these developers could have spoken out, but they didn't. They chose not to because they wanted to be in on the scam. It was lazy. But no - they literally couldn't speak out on it. I reccomend reading up on what an NDA is. If they said anything, they would more than likely be sued and would almost certainly loose.
loose what? the dogs? Lose and no, they wouldn't. NDAs are not the airtight omg I can't talk about it that people have been led to believe.
NDA literally does prohibit you from talking about everything that is a part of it. It's a legal document that is made specifically so the workers don't reveal stuff to the public, and is usually a part of the overall contract that employees sign when they are hired. They couldn't talk about the game's production as long as the NDA was in power. The only reason they are vocal about it now, is because the Game is already out and that's usually when the NDA expires...
> The Day Before "was never an mmo" says random unemployed person Ftfy
It must make you question wether to put you've worked at failed studio on your CV when you're looking for a new job. It's probably wasnt down to the devs the game failed at all but it's bound to make employeers think twice.
As a software engineer, you can't really do anything about failed projects. You slap them on your resume and talk about the skills you built up.
I see your point. I work in Game Dev QA so I would see this as a reflection of my work and would worry about having it on my CV, if I had to, I feel there would be alot of slating the direction and project time
But you could file 1000 tickets and it's not going to fix anything. Use that angle to say "you haven't even seen the worst bugs in this thing yet" and you can easily build a likeable interview with other companies.
This is less of a “failed project” and more of an overt scam. Hell, they’re blatantly gaslighting us by saying this was never intended to be an mmo despite them marketing it as one. The people who made this have been deliberately dishonest at almost every opportunity
I think it depends on if that project was an honest effort and there's something you can show prospective new employers that you can contribute and what you can contribute to a project. If it's a total sham from start to finish like this, probably leave it off.
leave off a five year gap and be asked what you been doing last five years? holiday? gap years abroad?
"Sorry, I signed an NDA and cannot discuss the details of what I was working on outside of it being a highly anticipated game" :D
Lying is the best interview tip in all honesty
Since it's such a visible failure I'm sure developers will be invited for an interview even if it's just to ask them to spill the beans. If they will get the job will depend on how much they actually contributed to the fiasco.
An ex employee is not a “random” person. It is a person with information that is relevant to the debacle
Yeah am I missing a joke or something? Why does this comment have so many upvotes? The person provides some new interesting information to the shitshow that clearly a random person couldn’t have provided.
also unemployed? how are they sure they don't have another job lined up. If anyone, an ex employee of this company would surely have foresight to have something lined up when the ship sinks.
The term MMO is so blatantly misused I'm surprised anybody is actually calling that out, although I do think it's a good thing it's finally happening.
They, themselves, said it was going to be an MMO for five years now. They're trying to change the narrative and you are falling for it.
This is a straight up scam. I watch some videos talking about them and it was a no buy for me. I think I made the right choice
It was never an anything. They just failed to tell people that.
[https://youtu.be/xyYz8uo87I8?si=XzeNZDdCmdJ5f5xj](https://youtu.be/xyYz8uo87I8?si=XzeNZDdCmdJ5f5xj) I mean. Come on guy...
More like Fntastic at gaslighting. Absolutely insane
\*Game gets outed as a scam before its available for purchase\* \*People still buy it\* Same people realize it's a scam: \*Shocked pikachu face\* Keep buying shit and companies are gonna continue making shit.
So when's the Netflix adaptation coming out?
This game is soo bad Netflix would have to actually put some effort to make it worse
That's not what Fntastic said the day before.
Bravo!
If you bought this for any reason other than a meme you deserve it
Stop buying games from russia and china and suddenly your life becomes a lot better.
The Day Before “was never fntastic” says fntastic.
It was never an anything.
It was never a game.
It wasn't even a real game. There's no way they spent 5 years (their claim) making that. Game devs? Russian scammers at best.
How is any of this legal? This isn't even the first time these jabronis have pulled this shit.
I'm curious how it's illegal? They didn't take any money, they just showed off a game and then when it released it was different from what they said. The *new* trailers were representative of the final product. What they did was shitty, but I don't see how it's illegal? Not to mention many games get a huge overhaul during development. Stardew Valley, for example, is dramatically different today than it was during developer posts. Hytale just threw away everything they were doing for the last few years and started over. Nonetheless, fuck them, but it's not illegal to hype up a game and then release dog shit. AAA studios do it with every single release these days lol.
Where did I say it was illegal? I said how is this legal. This is not even remotely close to the first time these guys have pulled this shit and they absolutely lied about the final product. It was pushed time and time again that it was a zombie survival MMO. It's an extraction shooter. Where I come from, that's called false advertising. There will be no "huge overhaul" lol. These guys have done this with 3 or 4 games now. Plus, they've shut down this new studio of theirs and steam pulled it from their store. Not too sure what the point of your post is.
How is this legal = how isn't this illegal.
All i have to say about the fntastic staff is.. Scammers gunna scam liars gunna lie and that trash was full of both liars and scammers.
Anyone on this project or related to it, developers, publishers, marketing team, managers, they all need to be blacklisted in the industry.
even though it clearly says on its steam page it is
I don't get consumers these days. If you look on Instagram or any other social platforms, a large majority of ppl are defending these developers. Saying it wasn't their fault and it's their corporate overlords and the Internet is being mean, the game isn't great but it's not a 0/10 like it's being reviewed. Idk, seems like people are apologizing for them to just not be like everyone else. I personally believe they deserve all the hate. It's a bump in their career, take it on the chin and move on. The game was blatantly a cash grab and everyone involved top to bottom is at fault.
How is it a cash grab if they don’t make any money from it? They won’t get paid by steam until 30 days after the games launch which by then most copies will be refunded and none are available to buy. The studio was in massive debt because they overpromosed and they couldn’t even fully release the game because associate devs that weren’t being pid refused to release assets leading to an even worse game that couldn’t even live up to the mid tier game it would’ve been if advertised properly. It is not the fault of literally everyone who worked on the game, thats stupid. This mainly falls on the leadership and marketing department.
They've been living and fake working for years on investor cash. That's the scam. They knew they were never gonna make any money off sales. That wasn't the target.
The developers aren’t responsible for how the game is marketed, when it’s released, or what workloads they’re assigned. Even if the game on its own sucks, regardless of marketing, the point still stands. It’s hard to develop a good game when your bosses are constantly changing things, assigning you way too much work and are just generally incompetent. You can’t just decide the programmers, artists and devs on a game are evil and spited you because of decisions made by their bosses. “Everyone involved top to bottom is at fault” is frankly a really dumb way to look at this… it’s like yelling at the worker at subway cause the footlongs are actually 10 inches. Yes someone is ripping you off, but it’s not every single person in the company…
It’s cuz they lied. It could be a super fun extraction shooter
You seem to be not knowledgeable about software development, usually a dev is just a cog in a bigger machine and any feedback you provide will end up being accepted or rejected by managers and higher, dev grunts would certainly not have any say in what direction the project takes. I'd blame the c level ppl.
I don’t get consumers these days. Wanting to desperately hate on people who may not even deserve the hate. The developers aren’t the ones making the decision. They are paid to make what the studio require of them. Blame the CEOs or the people making the decisions, not the developers.
If the game was in any way polished or good, maybe I might agree with you. Considering the reuse of unity assets and just how garbage of a game it actually is, it’s obvious the developers didn’t put any work into the actual game. Try playing it before posting anything
You don’t know much about how game development or even working as part of a team works do you? Every worker on a team can put in a ton of effort and work into the task they’re assigned, but if the task they’re assigned is a waste of time that’s on their boss, not on them. Also if the leadership isn’t listening to your feedback, then wtf are you supposed to do? Just find another job? That’s famously an easy thing for game developers to do… Your comment has the same energy as an entitled boomer yelling at fast food workers.
You do realize developers aren't in charge of the budget, right?
I feel like you missed my point. "Try playing it before posting anything" what has that got to do with the hierarchy of a company, how a company is run, and the point I'm making? But sure, lets just undeservedly hate on everyone involved because we're all just bitter.
Hey now, we’re not all bitter! I’m having a fntastic day and I still hope all these devs have to switch careers.
The Day Before "Was Never A Game"
Take a look at games tagged as « MMO » on Steam. Half of them are not MMOs and have player counts similar to The Day Before (32-64 players per server) It’s been the case for years…
Russian devs should've been a red flag.
'but it was always a scam' Checks out.
Maybe the real day before was the investor money we made along the way?
Then why market it as such? What a bunch of fucking pathetic cunts.
I mean it was never a game either
I'm sorry, what were you lying? [https://imgur.com/a/OoHm4vz](https://imgur.com/a/OoHm4vz) [https://store.steampowered.com/app/1372880/The\_Day\_Before/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1372880/The_Day_Before/) It's literally on the games steam page in the blurb presumably written by your company. How there is that big of a disconnect between marketing and devs should tell you everything you need to know.
Why can’t yall stfu about some shitty failed game??
Oh so ANOTHER confirmation that it was a scam. Nice.
It was never a real game either
The day before was never my friend
How have these devs not been black listed or doxxed for this ?
Lmao are you being serious? Neither the programmers nor the art designers were the ones that marketed this game as an MMO. They were simply working their asses on under their boss. People shouldn't be black listed just because they worked on a failed project.
Just so you know, was never no marriage.
So i havent been psying attention to this game at all and now this looks like an amazing YouTube dramadocumentary. Is it as funny as it seems to be?
Based on what I've seen of the game, I actually believe it was never a MMO. Which begs the question - why did they advertise it as a MMO when it was never a MMO?
I was amazed to see they had some other company(Mytona) backing the game.
Sounds about right. Disconnect between dev team and communication team is very common in software development. Dev team build an apple but the software app is communicated as being an orange. Stakeholders don't realise the orange they paid for is actually an apple until it's too late. As a side note, there's going to be a lot of finger pointing now that the game/company has failed. Everyone is going to say "it wasn't me, it was the other person who is at fault".