‘The Day Before’ Came Out Last Weekend, Today Its Studio Shuts Down
Not even a week after the release of a contentious new zombie survival game, the dev studio of The Day Before announced its shutdown.
Buckle up because the wild ride that has been the saga of The Day Before comes to… well, maybe not a close, but at the very least, another dramatic turn in a rollercoaster of announcements, delays, disappearing trailers, and more. Today, after The Day Before has been out for four days (following a Dec. 7th release), developers Fntastic announced that the game had failed financially and the studio would be shutting its doors.
If you haven’t been following the rocky development cycle and the curious saga of The Day Before, here… watch one of the many videos on the subject. There is a lot of backstory to sift through.
In a nutshell, the zombie survival MMO game has been putting its worst foot forward since an ill-fated week-long delay of its announcement trailer. And in spite of all that, the game was once, briefly, the most wish-listed game on Steam. And now it’s out, and the developers are immediately shutting down, leaving the future uncertain.
The Day Before Releases, Studio Closes
In a post on Twitter, the official Fntastic account, @FntasticHQ, released a brief post with just the words “Official statement.” This comes after three days of radio silence. The last post from the account was a statement promising “A huge update, including server and AI fixes” on December 8th.
The official statement reads:
“Today, we announce the closure of Fntastic studio. Unfortunately, The Day Before has failed financially, and we lack the funds to continue. All income received is being used to pay off debts to our partners.
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.
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, swet, and tears into the game.
AdvertisementAt the moment, the future of The Day Before and Propnight is unknown, but the servers will remain operational.
We apologize if we didn’t meet your expectations. We did everything within our power, but unfortunately, we miscalculated our capabilities. Creating games is an incredibly challenging endeavour.”
And what a statement that is! You could argue that they put all their effort into developing The Day Before, but that would leave out the lengthy period where the developers were advertising talking about Continent, a teams-like app that was inexplicably part of a campaign where they “declared war on offices.”
No seriously.
This comes from a now-deleted Tweet made back in January, recovered thanks to the Internet Archive, where they market the Continent app. If you Google ‘Continent App’ right now, Fntastic is the fifth result on the first page!
And this is just one part of the long, strange story that has been the development of the game. It’s hard to say what, exactly, is up, but the whole thing seems fishier than the Gulf of Mexico during the Bluefin tuna spawning season.
Now that the studio is closing, will the Day Before finally be done? Or is there still more to the story?
