I’ve been trying to figure out what makes The Day Before story so interesting to people and I’m coming up empty handed. I’m not trying to be willfully obtuse, I just don’t get the fascination. Everyone was so excited to dance on its grave when the developer, Fntastic, announced it was pulling the game from digital stores and shutting down the studio for good. The bloodlust reached such a fever pitch that the developers of competing survival games DayZ, Rust, and Icarus decided to get in on the fun, using the opportunity to advertise their games in the grossest way possible.
I promise I’m not here to clutch my pearls over people’s reaction to The Day Before. It was a terrible game that was greatly misrepresented by the developers. Every cent taken from customers ought to be refunded – and as far as I can tell, will be – and everyone who actually bought the game who feels duped deserves their chance to dunk on it. But companies ain’t people, folks. Watching Bohemia Interactive, Facepunch Studios, and RocketWerkz use this as a marketing opportunity sucks.
The only thing that makes The Day Before interesting is the fact that it was such a high-profile failure. Dozens of games are released on Steam every day that are just as bad and worse than The Day Before, and no one cares. This one hit the algorithm though, landing at the top of Steam’s most-wishlisted games for the year, so all the sudden it’s being treated like a scam, when in reality it’s just another bad Steam game. It’s not even the most high-profile bad game this year. Look at Redfall. Look at Gollum.
Misrepresenting the quality of a game does not make it a scam – that’s just marketing, baby. I’ve never played a game as good as the developers said it would be, even the really good ones. It’s also not an asset flip, which is an accusation I’ve seen floating around. Using store bought assets is not the same thing as buying an already made product and selling it with a different name. Fntastic made a game, it’s just a really bad game.
The Day Before Developer Shuts Down Less Than A Week After Launch
The Day Before developer says it’s shutting down due to unpaid debt, just days after the game’s disastrous launch.
In the midst of the feeding frenzy that surrounded Fntastic’s closure, the DayZ team released a mock statement stylized after Fntastic’s real statement, congratulating itself for developing a long-lasting game. I thought that was in pretty bad taste. Then, Rust’s Twitter account reposted DayZ’s statement, except it crossed out DayZ and replaced it with Rust, which I thought was in pretty bad taste, and also lazy. If you’re going to dunk, then dunk. You can’t steal someone’s meme and put your name on it like you’re Elon Musk. Get your own material, Rust. There’s your asset flip.
But the point is neither studio was actually there to get a kick in on Fntastic’s corpse, they were just there to advertise. If that wasn’t clear, check out The Day After Survival Sale, a discounted bundle that includes both DayZ and Icarus, games from two different studios that would both like to make a buck off of another studio’s failure. This is the game studio equivalent of the “How do you do, fellow kids” meme, except Buscemi isn’t an undercover detective, he’s a salesman trying to find customers.
The Day Before shouldn’t have been released, and good riddance to Fntastic, but also, how about competing game studios stay in their lane? I don’t want to see a game industry full of devs that point and laugh at each other’s failures, or worse, use it as an opportunity to get money from people who are rightfully upset because their money was taken from them by dishonest game devs. If nothing else, it’s a pretty risky choice, karmically speaking. You know what they say, developers who work in glass studios shouldn’t throw stones, and maybe the studio that missed the launch date for DayZ by six years should know better than this.