Today, we announce the closure of Fntastic studio. Unfortunately, The Day Before has failed financially, and we lack the funds to continue. All income received is being used to pay off debts to our partners.

We invested all our efforts, resources, and man-hours into the development of The Day Before, which was our first huge game. We really wanted to release new patches to reveal the full potential of the game, but unfortunately, we don't have the funding to continue the work.

It's important to note that we didn't take any money from the public during the development of The Day Before; there were no pre-orders or crowdfunding campaigns. We worked tirelessly for five years, pouring our blood, sweat, and tears into the game.

At the moment, the future of The Day Before and Propnight is unknown, but the servers will remain operational.

We apologize if we didn't meet your expectations. We did everything within our power, but unfortunately, we miscalculated our capabilities. Creating games is an incredibly challenging endeavor.

We're grateful to everyone who supported us during these difficult years. It's been a fantastic journey over the past eight years:
2015: Opening of the studio
2017: Release of The Wild Eight
2018: Release of Dead Dozen
2018: Release of Radiant One 2021: Release of Propnight
2023: Release of The Day Before

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[–] ComputerSagtNein@lemm.ee 100 points 11 months ago (2 children)

They are scammers and nobody should feel sorry for them.

I bet even this was planned from the beginning. Get some money out of the "game" and then just disappear.

[–] slaacaa@lemmy.world 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The amount of people who don’t understand how this is a scam is sad. It’s not about the pocket change from steam sales (which they may get or may not at all), it’s about living for a few years on investor money and doing nothing (or working your own business). And they did release a game at the end, so the investors cannot easily sue them for fraud, as they can just put their hands up and say they tried, it just didn’t work out.

[–] avater@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Get some money out of the “game” and then just disappear.

Is this even possible with the way steam handles the payment of developers? If I remember correctly you get the money not directly and steam also freezes a certain part for refunds.

[–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The few people at the top of the studio paid themselves a juicy salary from investors' money for 5 years, then released a Unity asset pack they bought for a few hundred bucks as finished end product.

[–] avater@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

it's build in Unreal Engine...

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

True, although I would guess the central argument still holds water. Most of the "game" looks like an asset flip indeed.

[–] Zahille7@lemmy.world -2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Unreal, Unity; is there much distinction between the two nowadays?

[–] computergeek125@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago

Several paragraphs of licensing drama

[–] dinckelman@lemmy.world 86 points 11 months ago

Everyone knew it would be a pump and dump

[–] Vlyn@lemmy.zip 75 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That was fast. Their claim of 5 years in development is histerical.

The city map is a bought asset for a few hundred bucks. The survival mechanics were a bought kit too.

If you cut out marketing you could build that type of asset flip in weeks to months.

[–] Rose@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

I'm not even sure they paid for those assets. Asset piracy is a thing.

[–] simple@lemm.ee 56 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Wow, that was fast. Usually you'd get an apology post and a promise things would get better before a studio admits it failed.

From the post it sounds like they could've been swimming in debt and can't pay for any more development.

[–] mateomaui@reddthat.com 32 points 11 months ago

Apparently they were going to make an attempt, but life comes at you fast

[–] slaacaa@lemmy.world 51 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Ruthless update from DayZ devs:

[–] illi@lemm.ee 23 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Funilly enough I had no idea DayZ is still around and also actually launched at one point?

[–] towerful@programming.dev 6 points 11 months ago

Namalsk (modded map) is hugely popular.
It's also on consoles...

[–] GrammatonCleric@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Standalone is still a bit janky, but provides a fun experience on console

[–] mateomaui@reddthat.com 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

~~dead game~~

damn that is brutal

[–] Talaraine@kbin.social 6 points 11 months ago

you can say that again

[–] Zellith@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago

TIL Dayz isn't in early access any more.

[–] TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.world 50 points 11 months ago

We have known for 2 years that it was going to be like this, the surprising part is that it was actually launched.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YFJEMyPyHA

[–] Uninformed_Tyler@lemmy.world 27 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Under promise, over deliver. The other way around only works if you're trying to capitalize on hype.

[–] slaacaa@lemmy.world 15 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

You do realize this was a scam?

With some different outcome scenarios for sure, but all of them included some dudes living on salaries payed by investors for a few years, then fucking off into the sunset with a variable amount of pocket change from the day 1 sales.

[–] wildginger@lemmy.myserv.one 2 points 11 months ago

Is there a source for any of this? Speculation is one thing, but Ive seen people claiming this was made in both unity and unreal, and that some assets are bought, then all assets were bought, that they were only working for 2 years not 5, etc etc etc

Like I know it looks scammy, but whats the hard line people used to actually determine that?

And theres got to be some hard line, since the dayZ team mocked them for this. I dont expect another company to mock a fellow game maker shuttering unless there was harder evidence that they were scammers beyond internet guesswork.

[–] echo64@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Nah, just promote what you have. You don't have to 'over deliver', for some reason hiding away the great stuff you made. Just don't over hype.

[–] Uninformed_Tyler@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

This is not a story about a company failing because they hid product capabilities from their customers and were underappreciated because people didn't realize how good their product was. This is a story of a company over promising in their marketing and failing to deliver.

I stand by what I said in the context of this story, which is what we are discussing. if you don't know if you can deliver a feature don't put it out there that you're trying to make the feature. If customers know you're working on something and then you can't deliver they feel like they lost that thing. If they don't know that you're working on it and you pull it out of the hat before lunch or even in a post launch update everyone is excited because they feel like they got something extra for free. Obviously on launch you should explain the full capabilities of your product. But again that is not the context of this story.

[–] Lanusensei87@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago

What a disaster.

[–] Lunar@lemmy.wtf 17 points 11 months ago

That sucks, but the studio was very misleading about The Day Before.

[–] mateomaui@reddthat.com 14 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The game blows but this review has a lot of replay value if you haven’t seen it already

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qMh7lv8wmHs

[–] Goronmon@lemmy.world 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What's crazy to me is that the game looks as good as it does on a surface level. It doesn't immediately stand out as a "This is a garbage game that is going to lead to a studio closure", at least until you see the person actually play the game.

[–] cradac@feddit.de 28 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I think we're going to see a lot more of those types of games in the future. It's pretty easy to make a decent looking game with UE 5 - still doesn't give it any soul though.

[–] maxenmajs@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago

It's also worth noting that they used UE5 store assets rather than making their own art. It may look decent in a single screenshot but games made like this often have an incohesive art direction and can't match the quality with their own work.

[–] Goronmon@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago

I thought you were exaggerating but after reviewing the thread at https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDayBefore/comments/18ee3t9/i_present_to_you_the_asset_flip_file_dump/

Yeah, this is going to keep happening.

[–] Neato@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago

Yeah, look at Starfield. It has really nice looking textures and objects. Everything else is a disappointment or mediocre. Maybe excepting the Ship Builder feature.

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The city looks amazing! I'm guessing they spent all their time on the graphics and forgot the actual game.

[–] Davel23@kbin.social 18 points 11 months ago

The game is completely made with bought assets.

[–] Lanusensei87@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago

The city is an asset pack lmao.

[–] Neato@kbin.social 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

To be fair, it seems like they've made 5 games and 4/5 weren't very good. Not surprised this was their last hurrah. I know Steam scores generally don't equate directly to sales, let alone profits, but it seems like the company was struggling.

[–] GrammatonCleric@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago

Maybe they should've crowdfunded and did preorders

[–] Zahille7@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

Man who could have seen this coming.

[+] Aielman15@lemmy.world -9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Sad to see another dev forced to close.

I admit I had never heard of them nor their games.

EDIT: Apparently the game sucked and nobody bought it? Looking at some random gameplay video, it really looks like a mess.

[–] dinckelman@lemmy.world 33 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Really not upset about it at all. They've lied to people, mislead everyone, gave false or incomplete descriptions of the product, and then released a horribly buggy asset dump, that doesn't look anything like the pre-rendered clip they've shown forever ago

[–] Aielman15@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh, I see. As I said, I had never heard of them or their games before today, so I was missing the context.

[–] mateomaui@reddthat.com 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

If you haven’t already, watch the video review in my first reply. One of the funniest parts is when he gets killed out of nowhere and his reaction is “There’s someone else here! I’m not alone in this world!”