Today we learned about a survival game featuring Will Smith, but only because it's a massive failure

Last night, IGN posted a news piece about how Undawn, a free-to-play survival game starring Will Smith as some kind of apocalypse pal called Trey, has been a massive flop. Released in June 2023 for mobile and PC, Undawn had an allegedly huge budget, according to Reuters sources, but which only brought in under $300K last month, as estimated by research firm Appamgic. And on hearing this news everyone went: "Sorry, what are you talking about?"

To me, it's quite funny we all got surprised by the existence of this game purely because it spectacularly booted it. It's one of Tencent's first big in-house projects, according to the Reuters report, and is clearly mobile-first. It also looks like it was intended to be mostly marketed in China. Though I will say that, given it is also on Steam with full voice acting in English, it's still a bit weird this is the first myself and many other members of the RPS Treehouse have ever heard about it.

I think Will Smith being notionally in it somewhere as well just makes it seem even weirder, because he is extremely famous all over the world. It seems odd that he could have been part of a game that basically passed everyone by.

Since the game is free-to-play, I thought I'd give it a spin to see what all the fuss is about - though from what I can gather, Will Smith is only an optional support character, not a full-blown cast member. I didn't encounter him in the 20 minutes or so I played, which I was surprised by, given how prominently he features in both the initial Chinese advert for the game when it was first announced last February (thank you to director of research and insights at Niko Partners Daniel Ahmad for sharing this gem on Xwitter back then), and in a trailer from Undawn's French YouTube channel (minus any voiceover) in May. Then again, he doesn't currently appear on the Undawn website anywhere, so maybe it was only a promotional tie-in.

Edit: I have discovered that Will Smith seems to have had a few - unvoiced, likeness only, lol - side story missions (I haven't watched that whole video so sorry if the YouTuber says something weirdly offensive at the end of it). There were also limited timed events last year, one to get a backback and another where he'd show up twice a week for an hour and if you found him you got some boots, I think?

For what it's worth, Undawn also seems to be a pretty terrible game, which would explain why it's currently only sitting at Mixed reviews on Steam. The PC version still has a lot of 'Tap Anywhere' prompts on screen, and controls really badly. It certainly doesn't look like any of the official screenshots on the Steam page when you play it for yourself, either. Probably for the best it never made it to a worldwide release.