Dubious Quality

After its initial announcement in 2021, Fntastic released The Day Before in Early Access last Thursday. Here's the description from the Steam page:

That's what the developers said it would be, anyway. It was the most wishlisted game on Steam for quite a while. The description sounds pretty great, right?

What it turned out to be, though, was an extremely shitty extraction shooter that was so riddled with bugs it wouldn't even qualify as an alpha. Early Access titles can be rough, but it was nowhere near even those loose standards.

It sold over 200,000 copies (at $39.99) before word got out. Incredibly, almost half (46%) of those purchases were refunded. Staggering numbers, because it stuns me that 54% of the people who bought this game WOULDN'T refund it.

Today (four days later), Fntastic announced it was shutting down operations.

There have been signs all along that this game was a scam. Lots of signs. I think the degree of the scam, though, still took most people by surprise.

The only game I can think of that remotely compares would be the last version of Front Page Sports Football in 1999. I remember being shown a version of the game two weeks before it was going to be released and I asked, "How many months ago is this build?" The answer I got was, "This is the release build," and I almost started laughing because it wasn't even an alpha. The game wound up being recalled, and it killed the franchise.

The owners of Fntastic have scrubbed their social media accounts and basically disappeared. They'll come up for air at some point with a different company name, because that's what these kinds of people do. 

To Steam's credit, the game has been removed from sale and they're offering refunds to anyone who purchased the game, regardless of hours played. 

If you bought this, go get your refund.