The Day Before developers respond to fans demanding an explanation, ‘s**t happens’

If you haven’t been keeping up with all the juicy drama surrounding The Day Before, an absolute disaster of an early access zombie survival game, then here’s a quick run down.

The game was first unveiled back in 2021, with an impressive announcement trailer that showcased some seriously good visuals and a whole host of interesting mechanics reminiscent of online games like The Division 2. 

After two years of setbacks and delays, however, the game eventually released last Thursday (7 December, 2023) and turned out to be almost nothing like what was first shown. Rather than being an open-world survival MMO, The Day Before was actually more of an extraction shooter in the vein of Escape From Tarkov with zombies awkwardly thrown in.

It was also absolutely overflowing with bugs and technical issues so it’s safe to say that people who had spent their hard-earned money on the game (which was priced at $39.99 / £33.50) were less than impressed.

In response to its incredibly rough reception, the game's developers, Fntastic, suddenly deleted all of the content over on their YouTube channel, removing all previous trailers seemingly in an attempt to hide the obvious discrepancies between what was advertised and what players eventually got.

The company then posted a lengthy statement to Twitter saying that the game “has failed financially” and that they were shutting down. The Day Before was subsequently removed from sale on Steam, though it is currently unclear whether this was requested by the developers or an action taken by the platform’s owner, Valve.

This leads us right up to today, where Fntastic has bizarrely been individually responding to angry fans on social media. “Unbelievable that you guys hyped this game up so much and this is the end result,” commented user @Kypershot on a Twitter thread where the developer was laying out their plans for customer refunds. “This was our first big experience,” replied Fntastic, “S**t happens.”

Elsewhere, one fan responded with a mockup logo for “The Day Before 2”, commenting “hell yeah the comeback is real.” Dashing all of their hopes and dreams, Fntastic simply responded, “Nope, we’re closing.”

This is obviously massively unprofessional and seems indicative of a studio well out of its depth. The future of the game is currently up in the air, but this seems like a fitting end to one of the weirdest sagas of the last few years.

For some titles that are actually worth playing, see our guides to the best indie games or the best FPS games.