The day before another scam of 2023. Another cheap cash grab by the game dev with new interesting stories coming out as the days are passing.
As of now steam is providing no questions asked refunds to everyone. Its another asset flip scam and it is becoming difficult by the day due to technology evolving with Unreal engine 5. The audacity of the developers to market it as open world. The community as expected responded calling out their BS of not earning a single dollar from this fraud.
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Hype around the release of ‘the day before’
Well to be true I was kind of hyped about the game from its initial gameplay trailer. It looked great however I failed to notice it was a co-op multiplayer game. I honestly thought it was a third person shooter zombie game with maybe a Death Stranding kind of co-op.
Alas none of the promises were true when it came out which is a different story. But, people were able to notice the red-flags from the get go and there were valid concerns raised by a lot of people.
Concerns about how can a small indie studio build a AAA quality game. However the concerns were kind of overshadowed when Nvidia featured the game in their channel.
Bear with me on this I know when a game is featured on Nvidia’s official channel it doesn’t mean it makes it legitimate however it does removes certain doubts from the minds of the people as it it expected that a multi billion dollars organization would be careful before giving platform/featuring content of any other studio without their fair share of investigation/verification. Even a month before the ‘The day before’ release:
My feeling and lot of casual gamer’s feeling can be summed up with the following comment on the video. Call it lack of technical knowhow or naivety. Nvidia, IGN everyone featuring the video on their channel got everyone pretty pumped up regarding the game.
7th December (The day before goes live)
The twitter page of Fntastic proudly presents its creation to the world and yes people logged into their five years of sweat, blood and hard-work. Asset flips. Reviews rolled in and as expected people weren’t exactly happy or optimistic as they had been scammed.
Here is a list of assets used in the game from the unreal engine marketplace some of which are quite recent (reddit). So it can’t be 5 years of work can it ? Few days later for the purpose of running away, the did the following. A reason for the sake of giving a reason.
All this kind of meant that they lied from the get go. It was a scam to begin with and now they are just trying their best to grab whatever cash they can and just vanish.
Final Thoughts
The audacity of tweeting “shit happens” and then doubling down saying that they made nothing from it says a lot. Game engines have become really next gen. It does give indie studios the power of going AAA but also gives scamsters like these power to misguide people and running away.
It feels like the mobile game landscape is slowly crossing paths with the console/pc gaming industry. What you see in ads the gameplay being completely different. High time some quality control is introduced by Valve for developers publishing their games on the platform.
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