The Day Before ends its strange, sad tale by shutting down its servers next month, refunding all Steam players
Less than two months after its catastrophic Early Access release
The Day Before, once Steam’s most wishlisted game before experiencing a bizarre journey through multiple delays, accusations of being a scam, apparent legal disputes and a catastrophic Early Access launch, will shut down its servers in one month. The effective end to the game will accompany refunds for anyone who brought it on Steam.
As The Day Before prepares to put a final full stop on its run-on sentence of a tale, let’s recap. Developers Fntastic revealed the game back at the start of 2021, showing off what appeared to be an open-world MMO full of zombies and both elements of settlement-building and looter-shooters.
In the two and bit years following, the game rose to the top of Steam’s most-wishlisted rankings despite suffering multiple delays - and at one point vanishing from Steam entirely over an apparent trademark clash. Amidst the years-long delays was backlash to the devs’ use of unpaid volunteers and accusations that the game was a scam, largely caused by a lack of proper gameplay footage for a good while, before The Day Before finally launched into Early Access on December 7th.
That launch was, to put it mildly, a complete shitstorm, garnering thousands of negative reviews that plummeted The Day Before to among Steam’s worst-reviewed games of all time. Criticism targeted the game’s lack of polish, comparisons to extraction shooters rather than MMOs and general absence of quality in its lacklustre gameplay and experience.
The wave of criticism led to further accusations that the game had been a scam all along, and resulted in developers Fntastic announcing just four days later that they had closed down due to a lack of funds to complete the game’s development. At the time, the studio said that the game’s servers - along with those for its previous game Propnight - would remain live for the time being despite the game’s future being “unknown”.
That future became a lot more known earlier today, as Fntastic have now confirmed that The Day Before’s servers will switch off on January 22nd 2024 - exactly one month from today, and less than two months after it launched. Being an online-only game, the move will effectively make The Day Before unplayable.
In a statement posted to the game’s X account, publishers Mytona added that they would refund all players who had brought the game on Steam - both those who had already requested a refund and anyone else who owned the game, who will get their money back automatically.
“We extend our gratitude for the community’s support throughout the project’s life,” the publishers wrote. “Unfortunately, without a development team, we had no alternative choice but to officially close the project.”
While The Day Before certainly wasn’t worth playing or paying for - our own Ed said he “would've rather handed a stinging nettle £40 to line my socks than spend another minute in this empty husk” - its very-long-then-very-short saga has been a strange, tragic story of apparent grand ambitions gone awry. With players’ money (if not their time) refunded at least, hopefully some lesson has been learned somewhere for the future.