• Controversial game The Day Before will have servers shut down in January 2024, just 45 days after its troubled launch.
• Developer Fntastic has closed down and the entire project will cease to exist, leaving players unable to purchase or play the game.
• Steam will automatically refund remaining players and Mytona, the investor, has been collaborating with Steam to facilitate refunds for all purchasers.
This was a scam from the start. They fucked themselves because their trailer was popular and they promised the world. Their goal was to create a shit early access game with pre-made assets, get lots of buy in when it was released, endure some bad reviews, promise to fix things but then slowly dump support for the game. I’ve watched this exact thing happen probably ten times now.
What killed them was the hype and popularity. They were called out immediately for what they were doing and got stuck having to now make an actual game or face legal repercussions.
At the very least these cash grabs are getting spotted early and they’re not getting to sneak by without facing consequences.
Is it still a scam if everyone gets their money back?
This just feels more like incompetence rather than malice.
I don’t think consumers were the target of the scam; if they were, I don’t see a reason why they wouldn’t have accepted pre-orders for the game. In fact, I think they know that accepting pre-orders would have left them open to false advertising lawsuits which is why they didn’t go for them, and I think they were well aware that people could just refund the game so trying to scam consumers (in this instance) was probably not worth attempting.
Instead, I think the investors were the target. The brothers who own(ed?) the studio have been living off investor money for the last few years, and which how suspicious their finances are (their ludicrously high travel expenses, in particular) I’m sure they’ve hidden away a bunch more money.
The game that exists is a shameless, cheaply-made asset flip that I suspect only exists at all because it makes it much harder for investors to sue for fraud when there’s an actual product. If they’d just tried to take the money and run without releasing anything it’d be obvious fraud, but now they can claim they tried their best, expectations were too high, etc, and it’s difficult for the investors to prove otherwise.
This makes the most sense by far. Owners of a company always pay themselves a salary, and for a tech company with investors I’m sure these people were able to give themselves an extremely high salary. That salary money is legally their money forever no matter how crappy or failed the company’s output winds up being. Unless you can prove that an actual crime was committed to acquire that money, then it will remain legally theirs.
I’d agree with you but then you hear about all the sketch shit with the discord and the volunteers. I think they intended to make a game but planned for it to just be a quick cash grab and then they could just slowly dump it. It’s honestly a great strategy, just look at every game the atlas devs have made. They’ve basically mastered the strategy.
The investors aren’t getting their money back.
Scam is still scam, they could have been realising true gameplay trailers instead of wasting time on rendered false gameplay that does not reflect a game at all
Technically yes it’s still a scam. It’s just one that didn’t pan out for them. In this one particular instance anyways. It will continue to work for others.
I mean, it still would represent an attempt at a scam
Yeah a failed scam is still a scam.
I get the impression there is a lot of this bait and switch in the mobile gaming circuit with great game play shown on IG ads but the actual gameplay is nothing like advertised?