After a disastrous launch at the start of December, The Day Before’s servers will officially go dark on January 22, 2024.
In a statement on X, developer Fntastic posted a message stating the game would only be live for another 30 days.
“We extend our gratitude for the community’s support throughout the project’s life. Unfortunately, without a development team, we had no alternative choice but to officially close the project,” says Fntastic.
The note also emphasizes that Mytona, the game’s investor, is working with Steam to facilitate refunds for anyone who purchased The Day Before. The entire saga around The Day Before has been bizarre, to say the least. Aftermath has a highly detailed timeline of the whole saga, but here are the basics.
In January 2021 the first trailer for the game was released, showing an ambitious open-world survival MMO. The trailer impressed many, and was followed up by a lengthy gameplay demo.
Then, near the end of 2021, Fntastic revealed a 2022 release date. One month before its release in May 2022 the game was unceremoniously delayed, and Fntastic went radio silent for over six months. During this time, it was reported that workers at the studio were “volunteering” and working for free.
Fast forward to January 2023 and The Day Before is delayed again, this time over a trademark dispute, according to Fntastic. This resulted in the game’s Steam page being taken down, amidst The Day Before becoming the most-wishlisted game on Steam.
Then in November, the Steam page was finally restored, with Fntastic promising a release in December, but in Early Access. At the time the studio posted a note, saying
“You know for us it’s a huge leap forward from a little indie studio from the edge of the world and over all these years we’ve been going through pain, suffering and blood, but we’re doing everything possible to go through all the obstacles to the very top. We’ve encountered everything, from people’s disbelief to trademark attacks.”
The Day Before launched in December and was met with overwhelmingly negative reviews, all claiming it’s an utterly broken unplayable mess.
Just days after its release Fntastic announced it was shutting down and nuked itself off the internet, deleting its YouTube, Discord, and CEO’s Twitter account.
That brings us to now, with the entire game now planned to be taken offline. It remains to be seen what the real fallout from everything will be, or if there was ever really much of a game behind The Day Before.
