After years of hype, on Thursday December 7, 2023, The Day Before was finally unleashed onto PC. Immediately, it was clear that something was wrong. A lot of players couldn’t get into lobbies. Those who did discovered empty, lifeless maps, and a survival shooter that looked extremely different to what had been shown in trailers. Four days later, developer Fntastic announced it was refunding everybody and shutting down. In January 2024, The Day Before went offline for good. But the story of one of the most infamous game launches in history is not over. Fntastic is now allegedly suing an online publication for calling The Day Before a scam.
Despite what it said shortly after the launch of The Day Before, Fntastic is not actually dead. In September 2024, the studio announced a new game called Escape Factory, which it tried to raise funding for on Kickstarter. After the funding campaign failed, Escape Factory was canceled, and Fntastic said it would work on a different, prop-hunt-style game called Items. However, the company will be forever synonymous with its ostensible open-world survival game, and if reports are to be believed, the developer is keen to safeguard the remaining shreds of The Day Before’s dignity.
Yakutia.info is a publication based in the eponymous republic within eastern Russia. In a recent article, it claims that Fntastic has filed a lawsuit alleging that Yakutia published “information affecting aspects of the business reputation of Fntastic.” The complaint is supposedly based on two Yakutia articles that described The Day Before as a “scam” and said that the game “borrowed mechanics” from other games. According to Yakutia.info, Fntastic commissioned a study from linguistics analysts, who concluded that these words had indeed “affected the company’s reputation”.
Yakutia.info claims that it replaced the phrases in the articles that were cited by Fntastic’s but that this “did not satisfy” the Gotovtsev brothers, Fntastic’s founders and managers. The Gotovtsevs started Fntastic in Yakutsk, Yakutia’s capital, before relocating it to Kazakhstan.
“We, for our part, replaced the word ‘scam’ with ‘embarrassment,’ and the statement about ‘borrowing mechanics’ with an exact quote from the video blog of IXBT Games, dedicated to the failure of The Day Before,” Yakutia.info says, in an article translated from Russian into English by Google. “The quote talked about how American bloggers discovered many borrowings from other games. Thus, the meaning of the articles remained unchanged, but became more accurate.
“The word ‘scam’ is relatively new in the Russian language and has a wide range of meanings, from ‘failure’ to ‘fraud’. However, the article did not talk about fraud, but described the unexpected appearance of the company Fntastic in the information field with an apology after the failure. To avoid double understanding, we replaced the word ‘scam’.
“Fntastic offered to settle the conflict out of court only if we remove the articles and apologize. Based on the basic principles of journalism, we consider them pressure on freedom of speech and cannot remove the materials.”
Yakutia.info says it is now suing Fntastic in response. PCGamesN has contacted Fntastic regarding Yakutia.info’s claims and will update this story with any comment that the company provides.
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