The Day Before is dead, but people are still selling its Steam keys for $300

A little more than a week after it was pulled from Steam, The Day Before is selling for hundreds of dollars on the seedy gray market.

In case you missed the whole kerfuffle around the zombie extraction shooter's launch, suffice it to say, it really didn't go well. We put together a comprehensive account of the disastrous outcome for what was once Steam's most Wishlisted game, but the long and short of it is: the game released to truly abysmal reviews from players and critics alike, four days later developer Fntastic announced its closure due to The Day Before's financial failure, and right after that it apologized for the whole mess and offered refunds for all players regardless of playtime.

Needless to say, The Day Before is deader than dead, and yet, it lives on artificially due to the often-shady video game key aftermarket. As spotted by Kotaku, you can still buy The Day Before from unauthorized sites, although you can never be quite confident in the means by which the keys are obtained, or whether those keys actually work.

While it isn't recommended you visit any of these sites, much less pay them money for an online game whose servers are on death row, aggregator sites like GG.deals list The Day Before for as little as $233.97 (a steal, I know) or as much as $304 at the time of writing.

Again, I can't put a big enough red flag here. Even if you have an insatiable appetite for bad zombie games, there's no telling how long you'll have to even play the game before the inevitable server shutdown. And as I touched on before, it's not uncommon for unauthorized key resellers to sell dubiously obtained codes in the best of cases, and straight up illegally obtained ones in the worst instances. In the case of the Day Before's post-Steam delisting gray market, you really don't get what you pay for.

After earning an English degree from ASU, I worked as a corporate copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. I got my big break here in 2019 with a freelance news gig, and I was hired on as GamesRadar's west coast Staff Writer in 2021. That means I'm responsible for managing the site's western regional executive branch, AKA my home office, and writing about whatever horror game I'm too afraid to finish.