Game Developer Fntastic Closes 4 Days After Releasing Their Biggest Game

By Nate Parker | News | December 15, 2023 |

By Nate Parker | News | December 15, 2023 |

It’s been a great year for games. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a masterpiece. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 a triumph. Tears of the Kingdom? More like tears of joy. Even Diablo IV recovered from its rough launch and brought back the kill-loot-repeat loop that fans love. But 2023 proved that an embarrassment of riches can’t stop developers from releasing actual embarrassments too. Skull Island: Rise of Kong looks like a first-gen Playstation game and plays like a beta release. Stealth game The Lord of the Rings: Gollum promised players the opportunity to explore Middle Earth from its most wretched character’s viewpoint; instead, it tortured them with worse graphics than Skull Island and endless bugs. A number of outlets predicted it would be the worst game of 2023. It’s at this point The Day Before enters the chat.

Fntastic was an independent developer with a few minor successes on the Steam store. In January 2021, they announced The Day Before, a survival-horror MMO. Players would form teams and hunt for supplies and firepower through a post-apocalyptic city while fighting off zombies and enemy players, backed up by AAA-quality graphics. While not original in content or design and an ambitious leap forward that made long-time gamers skeptical, the first trailers made big promises.

Later that year, Fntastic gave The Day Before a June 21, 2022 release date. Several new trailers hinted at added features; a base where players could visit shops and socialize, more complex combat gameplay, drivable vehicles, and extensive weapon modification. But a month before launch, Fntastic announced the game was delayed until March 2023 due to a last-minute development change that included swapping to Unreal Engine 5. Predictions that The Day Before was nothing but vaporware grew despite Fntastic CEO Eduard Gotovtsev’s rare statements that the game would be worth the wait, and a January 2023 announcement of yet another delay until November 10 didn’t help. Fntastic had yet to show any real proof its game even existed as anything more than cleverly-cut trailers, but still insisted TDB was a genuine product and would be released as soon as possible. “As soon as possible” turned out to be December 7 and, when gamers finally got their hands on the final product, it was the last nail in the coffin for Fntastic.

Gone were promises of an MMO allowing players to seamlessly join parties and fulfill objectives. What remained was an uninspired extraction shooter where players with constantly dwindling resources couldn’t communicate with one another or pick their teams. The game world was so barren it lacked NPC enemies, with a rare zombie popping up only once or twice per session. Some players spent hours simply trying to log onto overloaded servers. Those who got on fell victim to endless bugs that Fntastic tried to fix with 2 hotfix patches in 2 days without success. 200,000 gamers paid $40 for access to this first rollout of The Day Before. Half demanded a refund within 48 hours. On December 11, Fntastic announced its closure.

Their explanation left something to be desired.

Fntastic closed up shop after that. Their website vanished. They deleted everything from their YouTube channel. CEO Eduard Gotovtsev wiped his Twitter account and muted his LinkedIn profile. All that remains is the studio Twitter account, and they’re not sharing anything new.

There have been any number of failed releases over the years, and studios closed due to incompetence or malfeasance. The bankruptcy of 38 Studios in 2012 after Rhode Island gave them a $75 million loan guarantee in exchange for promises of 450 new jobs is a prime example. Former Major League ballplayer and lifelong major league prick Curt Schilling founded the company and it released Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, an enjoyable if generic action RPG set in a high fantasy realm conceived by R. A. Salvatore. By all rights it should have been a guaranteed win, and the game was received with mostly positive reviews from publications and gamers alike — I enjoyed it a lot. Despite the successful release, however, 38 Studios ran itself into a financial hole and declared bankruptcy a few months later. Schilling claims his personal fortune of $50 million was also lost in the collapse. The studio closed without ever releasing a second game.

It’s difficult to say whether The Day Before was a scam or ambition exceeding Fntastic’s abilities. If it was a moneymaking scheme it failed. They’ll receive little money from Steam sales, if any, and they didn’t crowdfund The Day Before’s development, so they aren’t sitting on a pile of cash. That makes me believe they flew too close to the sun. Fntastic only released The Day Before when they ran out of delaying tactics, and it was like a desperate 7th grader’s last-minute model of the solar system for science class. Their failure is far from unique. Games remain trapped in development hell for years, and some never see the light of day. Their real mistake came in promising players more and more when they already knew they couldn’t deliver. Gamers aren’t the most forgiving bunch, but if nothing else a little honesty might have kept Fntastic afloat.