In 2023, The Day Before transformed from the most desired game on Steam to one of the biggest flops in video game history. However, it is said that the quality of the product was not to blame.
Who is the developer suing? The people behind Fntastic, the studio behind The Day Before, are suing the Russian news site Yakutia.info, which is based in the Siberian region of Yakutia – just like the game studio.
According to the lawsuit, the news website harmed Fntastic’s reputation by describing the developers’ behavior in connection with the development of The Day Before as a “scam” or fraud.
Furthermore, a statement is the focus of the lawsuit, in which they paraphrased YouTube influencers who claimed that The Day Before allegedly copied or “borrowed” mechanics and content from other games.
Will Webedia soon be sued by Fntastic as well?
Sorry, it wasn’t fraud, just an embarrassment!
How does the sued website respond? The people at Yakutia explain in a reaction to yakutia.info that the term “scam” is relatively new in the Russian language, and they did not intend to accuse the developers of fraud. Therefore, they replaced the term with “embarrassment” and expanded the second article regarding the influencer opinions with specific quotes.
Furthermore, the editors at Yakutia state that the developers specifically chose a small editorial team from their homeland for the lawsuit, which can hardly mount a legal defense. Meanwhile, there were numerous media outlets and content creators worldwide that supposedly used terms like “scam” and “fraud” in connection with The Day Before.
The developers themselves even believe that The Day Before was actually a good game at launch, which ultimately failed mainly due to influencers on Twitch and similar platforms.
What do I need to know about The Day Before? The Day Before was once supposed to be an ambitious survival MMO that impressed with stunning graphics and a host of exciting features in the early trailers. The project rose to become the most wished-for game on Steam, but then came the deep fall:
- Test phases as well as the final release were postponed multiple times.
- After the release of new trailers, players began to doubt the quality.
- In the meantime, there were reports that the studio was recruiting volunteers to work on the project for free.
- Then The Day Before also found itself in a legal dispute over its name and temporarily disappeared from Steam.
When the release finally approached on December 7, 2023, not much of the original hype remained. Nevertheless, The Day Before shot up on Twitch immediately, only to be torn apart on Steam. On December 11, the statement followed that The Day Before was “financially failed.” This meant there were not enough resources to continue.
Only a few days after the release, the shutdown already followed. It speaks for itself that certain reports surrounding the new project by Fntastic remind one of the game-turned-car crash The Day Before: The studio of The Day Before is asking for freely created content for their new game, offers no payment
