The Day Before, a “multiplayer” survival shooter from the Russian studio Fntastic, turned out to be one of the biggest fraudulent projects in the gaming industry.

The release took place on December 7, but 4 days later, on December 11, Fntastic announced the financial failure of the project and the closure of the studio. The game was removed from sale on Steam, and all players who bought it were offered a refund, even if they played for more than 2 hours.

On the first day of sale, 210 thousand copies of The Day Before were purchased, of which more than 90 thousand were immediately refunded. And despite the “successful” launch, the game disappeared from the top sales on Steam on the second day after the release.

On the fourth day after the release, Fntastic announced the closure of the studio. In a statement, they wrote that the game was a financial failure, that they no longer had the funds to continue working, and that they had invested “all their energy and resources” in the development of the game and were sorry that this had happened.

In fact, such an ending was expected. Announced in early 2021, The Day Before was supposed to be released in October of the same year, but then the first postponement took place, followed by two more.

During this period, almost nothing was said about the project. The studio showed concept art and screenshots, but the game’s gameplay was shown only on the eve of release. And what was shown looked like a complete copy of The Division and The Last of Us.

Another hint that we shouldn’t expect anything good from the game was how abruptly Fntastic moved from working on indie games to such a seemingly large project. The studio promised a lot, but in reality, the final product could not even deliver half of it.

What was supposed to be one of the most ambitious multiplayer games, as it turned out, was not even originally developed as a multiplayer game. One of the former developers spoke about this after the news of the studio’s closure.

Continuing with the list of all the possible red flags that the game had, Fntastic used unpaid volunteers to work on the game, and when this became known to the public, began to make excuses, saying that it was the choice of these same volunteers.

The result was a completely unfinished product that did not have the promised features, where the promised large multiplayer game was replaced by a small world for exploration and resource gathering, where it was not even necessary that there would be other players.

Unfortunately, besides the fact that a Russian studio with no experience in working on such projects decided to release something so ambitious, all the other controversial or even negative news related to The Day Before also failed to convince players around the world that this game was a complete fraud. However, fortunately, this was quickly exposed and The Day Before will remain in history as another deception from the Russians.