After finally releasing The Day Before on Steam Early Access roughly four days ago, developer Fntastic has announced its closure.
On Twitter, it stated that the title has “failed financially, and we lack the funds to continue. All income received is being used to pay off debts to our partners.”
“We invested all our efforts, resources, and man-hours into the development of The Day Before, which was our first huge game. We really wanted to release new patches to reveal the full potential of the game, but unfortunately, we don’t have the funding to continue the work.” The developer notes that no money was taken from “the public” during the game’s development with the lack of pre-orders or “crowdfunding campaigns.”
“We worked tirelessly for five years, pouring our blood, sweat, and tears into the game.” The future of The Day Before and Propnight is up in the air, but servers will remain available for both. “We apologize if we didn’t meet your expectations. We did everything within our power, but unfortunately, we miscalculated our capabilities. Creating games is an incredibly challenging endeavor.”
Fntastic didn’t mention anything about revenue earned from early access sales or how many units were sold to trigger such a decision. As such, given the numerous delays, trademark dispute, shift to early access, and user reviews (currently “Overwhelmingly Negative” on Steam) calling out its various issues, many are claiming the entire endeavor to be one big scam. Time will tell if we ever learn the truth about what happened.
Regardless, The Day Before is still available for PC via Steam Early Access. According to SteamDB, it peaked at 6,416 concurrent players in the past 24 hours, a massive drop from the all-time peak of 38,104 at launch.