Fntastic Studio announced its closure just four days after releasing its highly anticipated zombie MMO, The Day Before. The predictable part was that the studio closed, but the shocking part was how soon after release. The studio cited financial failure as the reason for the closure, stating that The Day Before did not generate enough revenue to sustain operations.
It is strange to send out a message saying, “please don’t call us scammers,” and then release an incredibly buggy and broken game just to hightail it out of there four days after release. The game is as tasteless as the tweet, and it looks like they released it anyway to make some money, even though it was bad. I’m not going to say it was a scam because that could be libel, but I suggest those who bought the game move forward with a class-action lawsuit.
Fntastic emphasized that it did not receive any public funding for The Day Before, relying solely on the studio’s own resources. That does not mean they are not making any money from the game. They still have the store page up to charge players. A studio closure means they released a game into early access and closed the studio to avoid fixing any issues.
We cover their statement prior to release more in detail in our article, but it looks like the company knew the game was not ready to be released. Closings don’t happen out of nowhere, they’d have known that they’d need money from the game to stay afloat.
One thing that I want to point out is that they indeed take money from the public even though they claim not to. They are taking money today by asking for $40 per copy of The Day Before on Steam when it’s not in a good state. They likely have no intention of fixing the game since the studio is closed. In my opinion, this isn’t okay to do and will probably end up on some lists for “biggest gaming controversies.”
