"Blood and tears"

The Yakut Studio FNTastic released the sparkling game The Day Before and went broke on the release day. Why did this happen?

The Day Before was twisted on Times Square. Hundreds of thousands of people added action to their lists of desired Steam. Since the announcement in 2021, The Day Before has been discussed, waited and mentioned caustically. And on the fifth day after the release, the Singapore de jure and the Russian de facto-developer Fntastic was closed. The game has already been withdrawn from sales, dismissed developers are anonymously sharing stories about strange work processes and blaming the leadership. We figure out what it was, and why the failure of the release is an important event for the Russian gaming industry.

Where did the FNTASTIC studio come from

A resident of Yakutsk, Eduard Gotytsev, has tried himself in the gaming industry since 2012. Then he became a resident of a student business incubator of the North-Eastern Federal University, won the republican grant and gathered a small team. The first project of the nameless studio was the Midnight Macabre: Mystery of the Elephant is a simple game for the American website of Big Fish Games. Success did not happen, and for a while, Edward focused on other business projects.

Eduard and his brother Aisen inspired the success of Alexei and Afanasy Ushnitsky -also natives of the Sahi and the founders of the extremely successful publisher of mobile (mainly) games of Myton with headquarters in New Zealand. The cooks himself spoke many times about this in an interview . Eduard's passion to develop led to the fact that in 2015, he, already with the younger brother Aisen, still returned to the industry with the new studio.

In 2016, the young FNTASTIC (then still under the name 8 Points), consisting of only ten people, entered the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform with the first game - The Wild Eight. It was a cooperative survival simulator in wildlife and extreme frosts. Given that the developers themselves come from one of the coldest places in the planet, the idea hooked an audience. The Kickstarter managed to raise more than $ 50,000 for development, the same Ushnitsky brothers were investing $ 12,000 for free.

The young publishing house with the Russian roots Hypetrain Digital helped to enter the studio platform. After the successful crowdfunding campaign, FNTASTIC received an investment from the publisher and a full advancement, the developers were finally able to afford a full-fledged office and took up full development.

In February 2017, the game came out in early access and achieved, although not deafening, but success - 12,000 copies were sold on the first day, and the development fully paid off in eight hours. But even then there was a dubious story that many did not even pay attention to: FNTASTIC came out of the development of the game, all relations with Hypetrain were torn: the publisher was engaged in the end of The Wild Eight. In 2017, the FNTASTIC game designer Alexei Attakov said that the game had to be “selling” due to the actions of unscrupulous partners inside the studio.

Now the Steam developer The Wild Eight is the Eight Points studio-this is not a rebranding of FNTASTIC, as many thought because of the obvious similarity with the old name 8 Points, but the attempt of the publisher to dodge the negative reviews, which gamers in the wake of the scandal around The Day Before began to leave under the old FNTASTIC releases.

The fate of the dead Dozen shooter is a lot like the situation with The Day Before

At that time, the studio independently engaged in both the development and the publication of the cooperative shooter in the spirit of Left 4 Dead . The story of Dead Dozen is rapid: the game was announced in November 2017, already in March 2018 they released in early access (although they were originally planned to be launched in December-January), and in June of the same year they closed it without completing. The developers colorfully described the game and showed beautiful videos. The authors attracted the attention of fans of the genre, but it was not possible to create a large stir.

As a result, the Dead Dozen players did not appreciate: the release state did not actually differ from the early alpha version or test assembly. There was a minimum of content in early access, the servers did not work normally, the graphics and animation did not at all correspond to what was shown in rollers and screenshots. The developers released several patches, and then said that they did not have funds for further support for the game. In 2018, Dead Dozen was removed from Steam sale. In 2022, Eduard Gotsev mentioned on Steam about the plans to restart the game after the completion of the current project, but no details followed this.

The only FNTASTIC project that did not cause disputes among gamers was the Radiant One - a simple “interactive movie” about the search for itself, which required no more than an hour and cost one dollar in July 2018. The topic found a response from the audience, which highly appreciated the release. The Russian division actively helped the Russian division of Apple: she even signed FNTASTIC to develop another game, but she never came out. And in 2019, the development of The Day Before began.

In November 2021, the next studio game was released - a fantastic “Seek Silk Side” Propnight . He partially repeated the history of previous projects of the studio - little content, monotony, problems with the network code, bugs and the development actually thrown halfway. But this time it turned out not as dirty as with Dead Dozen - even the grades of the game were medium. Propnight was released by the publisher of Mytona, who undertook to finance the development of The Day Before, but the details of the agreement are still unknown.

The Day Before - What is special about this game?

This time FNTASTIC attracted much more attention. The studio waved to AAA-Ural-her new game seemed surprisingly “serious” and expensive, at the level of projects from the most famous gaming companies. The developers promised too much.

In the debut gameplay trailer , The Day Before, released in January 2021, the developers showed an impressive picture on a popular unreal Engine 4 engine development engine. The players presented the metropolis accessible to the study, populated zombies and competing for resources of people who have lost their moral face. Shoots, survival, fuss with equipment, driving on vehicles and the atmosphere of harsh post-apocalypse-a suspiciously large-scale mixture of the series “Walking Dead” and Megapopular AAA-IGR The Division , Dayz and The Last of US . The Khumtsev brothers confidently promised “a breakthrough in the MMO-Swing genre”, incredible realism, the rejection of the mechanic who had bored as part of the genre and the release in June 2022. And such a short time between the announcement and release is a situation atypical for the gaming industry.

MMO is the abbreviation from the Massively Multiplayer Online, the genre of multiplayer games, most often role -playing. Within the framework of MMO, thousands of players are simultaneously on huge cards. Most MMO-IGR imply a seamless open world with a minimum load, complex pumping of characters and social interaction between players, including communication and trade. What kind of MMO mechanics did the developers of The Day Before wanted to reinvent.

Of course, everyone noticed such a wide swing from such a modest studio - the Russian media and the leading specialized publications of the West wrote about The Day Before. However, the players already then expressed doubts about the “reality” of The Day Before, given the complex history of the studio and declared by the developers of the ambition.

Until the release, scandals of various scales accompanied the game, incriminating the distrust of the players. In May 2022, the studio nevertheless transferred The Day Before to March 2023, explaining this by moving to Unreal Engine the fifth version. In the same July, the media drew attention to the information from the official FNTASTIC website, according to which, "a team of paid and unpaid volunteers works on the game." The developers had to explain that such an idea is the basis of the studio, and even Fulltaym-employees they call volunteers.

But the explanations of the developers did not save them from criticism, especially in English-language specialized media-journalists did not appreciate the idea of ​​using unpaid labor in any form. In January 2023, the page page suddenly disappeared from Steam. As it later turned out from the explanations of the representatives of FNTASTIC-due to problems (subsequently resolved) with the registration of the name, it already belonged to the developer of the calendar application . And at the same time, the game was postponed again - now to November.

Each time The Day Before appeared in the information due to some scandal or dubious statements in an interview . Because of this, the opinion continued to spread on the network that the game did not exist, and its development is a deception. In the Gamer community, she generally became a meme personifying the unenviable position of the Russian gaming industry in the conditions of sanctions. In February 2023, the new gameplay trailer The Day Before was released and in it the game looked much worse than in a debut video. Then even other developers connected to criticism - for example, Alex Nichiporkchik , founder of the TinyBuild Publishing House. The players noticed that the video scanarovo is copying the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War zombies and one of The Last of US TRILERS, they also found borrowing in other promotional materials of the game. The developers did not comment on these accusations.

But all this scandalousness and excuses (or vice versa - meaningful silence) of the founders of FNTASTIC only attracted even more attention to the game. Many were waiting for the release already out of pure curiosity, like the final of the series. In November 2023, The Day Before did not come out again: the release was postponed to December 7th. The developers also decided to gradually “roll out” the game: first release it in early access, and then - as it was already with The Wild Eight and Dead Dozen - gradually finalize.

On December seventh The Day Before really came out

The game instantly fell into the top of the most popular Steam games, the peak online on the release day amounted to 38 thousand people, almost half a million spectators watched Twitch streams on Twitch. But after a few hours online and The Day Before rating began to fall, and the end of the day it became one of the lowest Steam games. Of the 22 thousand reviews at the time of publication of the material, about 85% remain negative.

It turned out that the game still exists, but it is not at all like what the developers promised. For example, The Day Before unnoticed the genre unnoticed-instead of the promised full-fledged MMO, the developers released a sessional extract-player in the spirit of Escape from Tarkov : that is, no seamless open world and comprehensive pumping, local sorties for relatively small cards and no more than a hundred people in the server. The mechanic of survival is almost gone. From trailers, only locations migrated to the game: they looked much worse than in the rollers, and were collected from ready -made ascetes that can be bought in a set for $ 350. You can list the problems of the game endlessly: this is a huge number of errors, and an almost complete absence of dynamics on the maps, and useless ballistics, and in general a critical lack of content. The version that came out looked like a concept for a pitch to a publisher and unacceptable even by blurry standards of early access.

Many players issued a refund and accused the developers of deliberately deception. Gamers also noticed that the authors hid some old videos on the channel that could mislead, and removed the tags associated with the MMO in Steam, which only increased the number of accusations against the developers. Critics and bloggers were bewildered in bewilderment: from the same IGN edition, she received a unique one out of ten points.

On December 11, only on the fifth day after the release of FNTASTIC announced that The Day Before was a financial failure: there was no money to complete it, the studio was closing, and all revenue will go to pay off debts.

Former FNTASTIC employees began anonymously share details about the oddities in the development of The Day Before

On December 11, the game was removed from Steam sales, the developers closed the site, the server in Discord and YouTube channel. The co -founder of the FNTASTIC Eduard Gotsev deleted a personal account on the social network X. The publisher of Mytona apologized to the players and promised to return the money to everyone, regardless of the circumstances (according to the Steam rules, it is possible only if less than two hours were held in the game). According to the publisher, negotiations about the future of the game are going on, but there is no specific information yet.

“We put our entire resource in it, all possible efforts, The Day Before was our first big game. We wanted to produce new patches and develop the potential, but, unfortunately, we have no means for this. It is important to note that we did not take money from the audience - there were neither pre -orders nor crowdfunding campaign. We worked for five years in the sweat of the face, investing blood and tears in this project ” - from the official statement of FNTASTIC

Thanks to the leakage from the official Discord server The Day Before, it became known that sales of the game amounted to 201,076 copies, and the return issued 91,694 players. Given the small basic value of $ 40, regional prices, commissions, marketing costs (do not forget the same advertising on Times Square) and payment of server decisions-the game really brought the money, presumably, one or two dollars. In addition, all the proceeds are probably at the disposal of the publishers, so the people who accuse the Khruly brothers of that they simply decided to escape with a million-two, clearly hurried with conclusions.

Some game developers have already given anonymous comments to different publications, including Shazoo and Dualshockers . According to them, the closing news was a surprise even inside the studio itself - everyone was allegedly fired one day, albeit with the payments of vacation and additional salaries.

Over the past week, more than 50 resumes from former FNTASTIC employees appeared on HeadHunter. Also, from their words it became known that there was a strong turnover of personnel in the studio, people often left people after small miscalculations after small miscalculations, and the Gotsev brothers allegedly did not suffer any criticism of any criticism, intervened in all creative processes with their “Wishlist” and ignored the ideas of other employees. Because of this, many elements of the game were redone several times again or simply went to the trash. The developers were not surprised at the first reviews: some remained for the sake of experience or because of the inability to find similar work in the Russian Federation. But all this is not official information, but statements of anonymous employees.

At the same time, the developers themselves were puzzled themselves that The Day Before was positioned by the marketing department as MMO. According to an anonymous employee, the game from the very beginning was developed as the world saw it: a mixture of Rust, Dayz and Escape from Tarkov without serious role -playing elements and a hundred people on the server. One of the reasons for the problems of The Day Before, he called the lack of communication between the studio employees, the leadership and the marketing team.

In the industry, the opinion about the situation was divided. The players are adamant, while other developers, judging by the closed chats, sympathize with FNTASTIC, although they note that its example can adversely affect both players' trust and investment in young ambitious studios. But even “at the official level”, not everyone resisted the comments: so the developers of the online game of Dayz, also dedicated to zombies and post-apocalypse, have ironedly heard the situation around The Day Before. The 1C Game Studios company also did-a comic video was released on its YouTube channel, hinting that the studio is ready to consider the dismissed FNTAC employees.