The Day Before studio asks whether you're going to believe it or your own lying eyes as it attributes the game's catastrophic performance to a 'hate campaign' by 'bloggers'

pcgamer.com:

Fntastic, maker of the comprehensively disastrous The Day Before, has released a statement to combat «misinformation» circulating online about the game and the circumstances of its collapse.

If you've forgotten, The Day Before was, once upon a time, the most wishlisted game on Steam. It was a zombie survival game that played Pied Piper to hungry fans before the entire thing collapsed under scrutiny, entailing a bizarre marketing campaign, numerous baffling public statements, a fight with a Korean calendar app, and the withdrawal of the game from sale four days after it finally released.

The game's rocky road led plenty of onlookers to declare the entire project a scam of some sort, a claim that Fntastic has always strongly rejected. Now, it's come out once again to push back on claims that it deceived people, attributing its short, strange life to a «hate campaign» orchestrated by «bloggers.»

Posted to Twitter, Fntastic's statement claims that «certain bloggers made huge money by creating false content with huge titles from the very beginning,» creating «a gold rush among content creators» as others leapt aboard the bandwagon to bash the game.

«Remember the experiment where you're asked to count pink objects in a room and then recall the blue ones?» continues the statement, «You won't remember any. It's all about focus.» In essence, that means that «The negative bias instilled by certain bloggers making money on hate affected perceptions of the game,» and Fntastic encourages readers to «Look at unbiased gameplay like Dr Disrespect's stream at release,» noting that «despite the initial bugs and server issues, he liked the game.»

Alas, Dr Disrespect didn't turn the game's fortunes around, because—says Fntastic—«the hate campaign had already inflicted significant damage» (it's worth noting that the Russian version of the statement goes even harder here, claiming that «hate had already destroyed the game»).

This is, to put it delicately, a revisionist reading of The Day