In a shocking twist of events, The Day Before’s creator, FNTASTIC, has revealed on Twitter that it’s shutting down its studio, effectively immediately. In case you’ve not been in the know, The Day Before is an open-world, post-apocalyptic survival game that has been the subject of countless controversies, legal cases, and online debates since surfacing some years ago. Many believed it was vaporware; a fake game that would never surface. Well, it did – and then four days later, the game’s developer closed its studio.

It has prompted many to believe that the project was a scam the entire time. Just a week or so before The Day Before was released, FNTASTIC took to social media to request that people didn’t ‘accuse them of scamming’. Now, that very same developer has used the same social channel to reveal that it’s closing down its entire studio, after selling tens of thousands of copies of the game.

Did We Not See That Coming?

For years, The Day Before was a mystical, almost mythical game. It was in development for the longest time, with FNTASTIC never really providing any solid updates until the very end of the game’s production cycle. Even then, the trailers were bizarre, and the world of gaming never really knew what it was going to be getting when – if – the game was fully released. It has been on the market since December 7, but it hasn’t been a successful run for FNTASTIC.

From the moment the game was released, clips started surfacing online of horrific bugs. They were typically accompanied by awful, negative reviews. At the time of writing, the game is rated ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ on Steam with 14,500 reviews stressing how terrible a game it is. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before – even the base concept of the game was changed at launch, changing it from a survival MMO to an extraction shooter of sorts.

All that is about to end now that FNTASTIC has revealed it’s shutting down the studio that built the game.

It’s abysmal news for those that have invested any money in this game. Despite investing ‘efforts, resources, and man-hours’ into creating The Day Before, and trawling through a tense, lengthy legal battle to secure the name, FNTASTIC has given up on the project in less than a week.

As the team said in the post on Twitter, they ‘miscalculated (their) capabilities’. There’s no coming back from this – the community is furious, and there will be no recovering.