Game studio shuts down just days after launching anticipated MMO
By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.
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The Day Before, an open-world zombie survival MMO, experienced a dramatic series of events resulting in its developer closing down four days after the game’s launch.
After a much-hyped trailer launch back in 2021, The Day Before became one of Steam’s most wishlisted games and, after a couple of delays, it launched in early access on December 7th.
Initial reviews were not great. Though billed as a survival MMO, players remarked that it was more like an extraction shooter but with mediocre loot. Players to team up with were sparse, enemies to shoot were even more sparse, and there were numerous complaints about bugs, crashes, and server issues.
On launch day, Fntastic, the game’s developer, posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the game’s North American servers were working but filling too quickly. The next day, Fntastic wrote that it was working on a “huge update” that would implement fixes before going radio silent for three days as negative reviews piled up.
However, it doesn’t seem like that fix ever went through because, on December 11th, the developers posted on X that The Day Before was a financial failure, and as a result, Fntastic would be closing down.
“Today, we announce the closure of Fntastic studio,” the message read. Fntastic acknowledged that players were unhappy with how The Day Before turned out. “We apologize if we did not meet your expectations. We did everything within our power, but unfortunately we miscalculated our capabilities.”
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