Just a few days after the scandalous release of The Day Before, Fntastic studio announced its closure. According to the company, it will spend all sales revenue on paying off debts to partners.
In its official statement, the studio notes that The Day Before turned out to be a "financial failure." The team no longer has the funds to continue working, which means that the development of the action, which is in early access, will not be completed.
At the same time, the servers of The Day Before and Propnight, the previous Fntastic game, will continue to work.
It is worth noting that up until the release of The Day Before topped the list of the most anticipated games on Steam. This usually guarantees high sales at the start, but the results could be much lower than expected against the background of negative feedback from the first players.
"It is important to emphasize that during the development of The Day Before, we did not take money from players; we did not open pre—orders or launch crowdfunding campaigns," Fntastic said in a statement. The studio also apologized for unjustified expectations and noted that it had not calculated its capabilities.
The Day Before was released on December 7 and was criticized by users who massively accused Fntastic of cheating. The thing is that the project was promoted as an MMO in the open world, but in fact turned out to be an escape shooter in the spirit of Escape from Tarkov.
The online title has also plummeted from a peak of 38,000 to about 5,000 simultaneous players. Many users have started to return funds for the game, but the exact number of "refunds" is unknown.
At the start, The Day Before had only 18.5% positive reviews. This is one of the worst results in Steam history — along with Overwatch 2, NBA 2K24 and War of the Three Kingdoms. Now the situation has improved slightly, but the game still has an "Extremely negative" rating - only 20% of the more than 18 thousand reviews are positive.
The Day Before was officially announced in 2021 and has been in production for five years. The game's developer, Fntastic Studio, was founded in Russia, but now (together with the publisher MYTONA) is a foreign company.