The Day Before, one of the most controversial and catastrophic games in recent memory, will have its servers shut down in January 2024, just 45 days after the game launched in Early Access.
• Controversial game The Day Before will have servers shut down in January 2024, just 45 days after its troubled launch.
• Developer Fntastic has closed down and the entire project will cease to exist, leaving players unable to purchase or play the game.
• Steam will automatically refund remaining players and Mytona, the investor, has been collaborating with Steam to facilitate refunds for all purchasers.
I don’t think consumers were the target of the scam; if they were, I don’t see a reason why they wouldn’t have accepted pre-orders for the game. In fact, I think they know that accepting pre-orders would have left them open to false advertising lawsuits which is why they didn’t go for them, and I think they were well aware that people could just refund the game so trying to scam consumers (in this instance) was probably not worth attempting.
Instead, I think the investors were the target. The brothers who own(ed?) the studio have been living off investor money for the last few years, and which how suspicious their finances are (their ludicrously high travel expenses, in particular) I’m sure they’ve hidden away a bunch more money.
The game that exists is a shameless, cheaply-made asset flip that I suspect only exists at all because it makes it much harder for investors to sue for fraud when there’s an actual product. If they’d just tried to take the money and run without releasing anything it’d be obvious fraud, but now they can claim they tried their best, expectations were too high, etc, and it’s difficult for the investors to prove otherwise.
This makes the most sense by far. Owners of a company always pay themselves a salary, and for a tech company with investors I’m sure these people were able to give themselves an extremely high salary. That salary money is legally their money forever no matter how crappy or failed the company’s output winds up being. Unless you can prove that an actual crime was committed to acquire that money, then it will remain legally theirs.
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I don’t think consumers were the target of the scam; if they were, I don’t see a reason why they wouldn’t have accepted pre-orders for the game. In fact, I think they know that accepting pre-orders would have left them open to false advertising lawsuits which is why they didn’t go for them, and I think they were well aware that people could just refund the game so trying to scam consumers (in this instance) was probably not worth attempting.
Instead, I think the investors were the target. The brothers who own(ed?) the studio have been living off investor money for the last few years, and which how suspicious their finances are (their ludicrously high travel expenses, in particular) I’m sure they’ve hidden away a bunch more money.
The game that exists is a shameless, cheaply-made asset flip that I suspect only exists at all because it makes it much harder for investors to sue for fraud when there’s an actual product. If they’d just tried to take the money and run without releasing anything it’d be obvious fraud, but now they can claim they tried their best, expectations were too high, etc, and it’s difficult for the investors to prove otherwise.
This makes the most sense by far. Owners of a company always pay themselves a salary, and for a tech company with investors I’m sure these people were able to give themselves an extremely high salary. That salary money is legally their money forever no matter how crappy or failed the company’s output winds up being. Unless you can prove that an actual crime was committed to acquire that money, then it will remain legally theirs.