From the most wishlisted game on Steam to oblivion, The Day Before is to shut down in January 2024, mere weeks after its launch.
The chronicles of The Day Before are so strange, we suspect there’ll be an entire book written about it in the next year or two. Developed by indie studio Fntastic, the much-anticipated zombie survival shooter was announced in 2021 and swiftly became the most wishlisted title on Steam.
After a deeply strange development cycle and a calamitous Early Access launch, however, it’s now been announced that The Day Before will vanish for good on 22nd January 2024. The game only launched on the 7th December. That’s six weeks from launch to shut down – surely some sort of record.
In a statement published on X/Twitter (thanks, IGN), Fntastic announced that it had “officially ceased operations,” and reiterated an earlier notice that publisher Mytona is in the process of providing refunds for those who purchased the game from Steam.
“We extend our gratitude for the community’s support throughout the project’s life,” the statement reads. “Unfortunately, without a development team, we had no alternative choice but to officially close the project.”
The build-up to The Day Before’s Early Access launch was far too meandering to reiterate here, but in brief it took in multiple delays, a truly bizarre moment when its developers got into a legal tussle with the makers of a calendar app, and trailers that contained a glaring number of off-the-peg 3D assets and shots ‘borrowed’ from a Call Of Duty promo.
Then the launch happened, the player count dropped precipitously, and Steam quickly filled up with negative reviews; many pointed out bugs and crashes, but the overwhelming sentiment was that this wasn’t the open-world survival MMO promised a couple of years earlier.
Fntastic denied that it was all some sort of elaborate scam, but then some former staff came forward and said that the project was never, at any stage, actually an MMO in any case. Why did Fntastic lie about the scope of its game? Why not just market it as a simple extraction shooter (which is what the game actually is)?
As The Day Before plods towards its stunningly early death, these and many other questions still linger. Maybe one day we’ll finally get some answers.
