The Day Before developer resurfaces to blame the game’s demise on bloggers and hate

It’s been a long, weird, and ridiculous journey for The Day Before. Once the most wishlisted game on Steam, the zombie survival game promised the world but never delivered, with plenty of delays, strange statements, and an eventual release and almost immediate cancelation. Now at its end, the developers even released one final post defending themselves and the game, claiming the failure of the title was not because of them, but of a hate campaign.

Posted through Fntastic’s X account on Wednesday, the studio shared a lengthy text because “a lot of misinformation has emerged on the Internet from supposedly anonymous sources”. You can read it on the tweet embedded below, but suffice it to say that in it the studio accuses anonymous sources who claim to be former employees for spreading misinformation to make the game fail.

“We didn’t take a penny from users, didn’t use crowdfunding, and didn’t offer pre-orders,” says the post. “Even after the game was closed, we, together with the publisher, returned money to all players, including forcibly issuing refunds to those who did not request them. We are not a fly-by-night company.” These claims are true, only adding more fuel to the mystery of the how and why all of this happened. If The Day Before was indeed a scam, the people who bought it were not the target, as full refunds were given to absolutely everyone that chose to purchase it, even after surpassing Steam’s usual “2 hours of play” limit. At most, the only thing they took from players was time and excitement.

The saga ends, not with a bang but a whimper

The rest of the post goes on to defend the now defunct studio, claiming that these anonymous sources may or may not be real, as they “had excellent relationships with our team.” Additionally, they also blame the media for the failure of the game, with accusations that “certain bloggers made huge money by creating false content [...] to gain views and followers, exploiting the lack of information about the game’s development. Their actions triggered a gold rush among content creators due to the game’s pre-release popularity.”

And as for the main reason why players considered the game a scam in the end, it being the misleading trailers, lack of promised features, and a bait-and-switch change of genres at the very last minute, Fantastic continued to defend themselves. “We implemented everything show in the trailers, from home improvements and a detailed world to off-road vehicles. We only disabled a few minor features, like parkour, due to bugs, but planned to include them in the full release.”

So is this really the end for Fntastic? If the post is to be believed, then it might not be. They close off the statement by encouraging readers to subscribe to their social networks “to know what will happen next,” which would imply that the studio isn’t quite as shut down as they said claimed it was only a month ago.