The Day Before debacle only hurts honest game developers

Not much in life is completely black or white. But Fntastic, the now-defunct developer behind The Day Before, just showed us the worst part of the gamer-developer dynamic, and it could spark unwarranted distrust toward honest game developers.

The Day Before launched on Dec. 7, and it was just four days after launch when its development studio closed its doors. This unfortunate turn of events wasn’t just bad in a vacuum, it also dealt devastating damage to the already-strained relationship between gamers and developers, making life for hard-working, honest developers that much harder.

The Day Before was advertised as an open-world MMO. It’s not, and was rightfully shredded to pieces because of it. You can’t falsely advertise and simply walk it off. Fntastic could possibly have salvaged the situation if The Day Before was a decent extraction shooter, at least. But it’s not that, either, and rightfully was blasted for that too.

So, what is The Day Before? According to most responses to Fntastic’s announcement of the studio’s closure, and a vast majority of the game’s over 20,000 Steam reviews, The Day Before is a scam.

I don’t want to throw around the S-word around like it’s nothing, but I hate what The Day Before represents in the bigger picture. It’s a monument to the distrust between gamers and developers, showing why the former can come off as overly critical, and why the best developers around sometimes catch a stray bullet triggered by shenanigans like the ones pulled by Fntastic.

There’s one bit of Fntastic’s statement I can get behind—game development is hard. There are thousands of developers out there who are genuinely doing their best to create good video games, and lumping them together with Fntastic under the generic “video game developer” tag makes no sense. Larian and Fntastic are not one and the same just because they are technically in the same profession.

But the mere existence of games like The Day Before makes it understandable why gamers don’t and can’t blindly trust developers. The threat of another web of lies and misrepresentation, of minimum-effort games sold for $40+, of the studio pulling the plug at any given moment, is enough to keep gamers on edge.

That said, it’s imperative for the benefit of everyone who loves video games that any such distrust is placed at the right door. Now that The Day Before has officially failed, we can all acknowledge the many red flags in the leadup to its release, but the red flags were always there. Whenever that’s the case, gamers owe it to themselves to band together and revolt—but we shouldn’t let one rotten apple spoil the whole batch.