The Day Before Delisted From Steam Days After Troubled Launch, Studio Fntastic Announces Shutdown

gadgets.ndtv.com:

The Day Before, once Steam's most wish-listed open-world survival MMO, has been delisted from Valve's platform. The game launched in early access to an almost immediate flood of negative reviews last week, with most players claiming that it wasn't really an MMO but an extraction shooter reminiscent of Escape from Tarkov, combined with the post-apocalyptic threats of The Last of Us. The misleading gameplay claims were made worse by several game-breaking glitches that caused characters to clip off from the map, an incomplete and sparse world devoid of action, and inconsistent online features. Merely five days after release, the game is no longer available to buy on Steam and Fntastic, the studio behind the game, has announced it is shutting down and working on refunds for customers who bought the game.

“Today, we announce the closure of Fntastic studio. The Day Before has failed financially, and we lack the funds to continue,” the blog post reads, with the developer originally claiming that all earned income would be used to pay off its debts. There are no plans to patch the game and turn it into something that the creators originally hoped for either, since more funding is out of the picture. Sure, the shooter was never crowd-funded, but the accusations of stolen or repurposed assets, a barrage of misleading gameplay trailers, and a $40 price tag on a game that was quite possibly a scam didn't work in the studio's favour. Debuting with 38,000 concurrent players on Steam, the player base has been steadily going down — no uptick during the weekend either — as players realised how the expectations from the trailer had been wrecked. At the time of writing, The Day Before has 749 concurrent players. (Probably the select few