The Day Before remains the liveliest dead game I've ever seen. The servers are officially gone and the actual game has evaporated, but the sheer magnitude of its mismanagement is still unfurling. In a new report from Game Two, which cites another report from GameStar, former members of now-defunct developer Fntastic allege that the project saw constant do-overs, a dire lack of creative vision, terrible working conditions, and crunch that employees literally had to pay for in the form of fines, painting the already disastrous project in a somehow grimmer light.
As PC Gamer first noticed, the report collects accounts from 16 former Fntastic employees and one of the studio's controversial "volunteer" workers, as well as seven members of The Day Before publisher Mytona. It opens with some background on Fntastic's origins in other games – including some decently reviewed and fairly successful games like The Wild Eight, a frigid survival title – that routinely ended up being sabotaged by over-designed trend-chasing. Stop me if this sounds familiar.
This was reportedly a recurring theme throughout development of The Day Before, which started off as a small-scale, cartoony survival game with zombies and, at most, light multiplayer options. But the co-founders of Fntastic, brothers Eduard and Aysen Gotovtsev, are said to have upended development on a regular basis by inserting whatever ideas they wanted to ape from other, popular games. This included the likes of GTA Online, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, The Division, and many more. I've seen game devs joke about directors barging in on Monday morning raving about this cool game they played over the weekend, and this reportedly happened all the time at Fntastic in the most heavy-handed way possible.
One source said design specs and targets could change almost daily, with heaps of work thrown out in the name of increasingly over-scoped goals. The creative direction was so all over the place that one designer says (per Game Two's English subtitles) that they "only found out via trailers that the game was to be an MMO." If you haven't heard, it was not an MMO.
Fntastic's work culture is also skewered, as is the bizarre, now-deleted video that studio leaders released to hype "life at Fntastic," which reportedly left many employees wondering where this magical, happy company could be found. Multiple sources allege that Fntastic not only relied on unpaid volunteers, exploited young and ignorant newcomers with no other game dev options in rural Russia, and saddled employees with debt via work equipment contracts paid off via salary, but also forced people to pay fines for work deemed unsatisfactory.
Two people were reportedly fined $1,930 for unsatisfactory performance – in this case, actual voice performances. Of course, you're inevitably going to make mistakes in an environment with crunch culture said to be so extreme that one source claims to have begged "for a few hours break just to find time for a shower or a meal," with another saying they "never worked less than 16 hours a day." On top of that, employees say they were monitored by Fntastic's in-house messaging software once meant to be marketed as a Slack competitor, causing yet more stress.
One of the more revealing anecdotes covers the leadup to The Day Before's launch, which was such an unmitigated catastrophe that the studio shut down four days afterward. Fntastic reportedly barely tested the game at all, with just five testers at the studio – and then four, after one was apparently fired when a higher-up found a bug, and if one bug is getting people fired you've got to wonder how anyone still had a job at this point. One source says the game's leads "didn't even understand what would happen to the game when a server was full," which certainly tracks with the connection issues seen at launch.
The Gotovtsev brothers were curiously absent during The Day Before's implosion, leaving the team to issue whatever bug fixes they could – until the co-founders returned to abruptly shut down the studio and, remarkably quickly, invite any willing devs to join their new, from-scratch studio, said to be making mobile games. That brings us to today, where Fntastic's latest public statement is one attributing The Day Before's failure to a "hate campaign."
The bizarre history of The Day Before: From Steam's most-anticipated MMO to a bland survival game that killed a studio.
