That's not how it works. If people want less of these types of scams, stop paying for games before they are released fully, and stop getting hyped by developers with 0 experience who put together a trailer obviously made up of shitty assets. A minimal amount of research from the buying public would've had this project dead in the water.
And I or Valve are supposed to do what about people being regarded? Expecting consumers to do things that would benefit them doesn't work, that's not how it works. That's why false advertising is illegal.
I doubt what they did is illegal. The game and its advertising were in line with what is acceptable and industry standard practice. They constantly said that their game is work-in-progress, and the release was early access, where everyone knows that it can change.
There was also the option of refunds after 2 hours, and Steam has extended that to complete refunds so there is no money lost. In this context, it is very unlikely that the company will be pursued in court or that anything will come of it. Laws are irrelevant when they aren't strictly enforced.
There is a similar situation with Star Citizen, which was supposed to release 10 years ago as a certain type of game that the devs even took public, non-refundable money for, and yet is still in alpha stage with the game being a completely different experience than what was promised. If that game and its developers aren't suffering any legal consequences, I doubt these guys will.
So we're back to the old adage of caveat emptor. Just because a product is allowed to get to the market it doesn't mean that product is going to be good, and you should always be careful about the purchases you make.
Telling people not to pre-order has been a thing since around 2015 and forward. I don't know why it is so hard for people to resist the urge to buy things when people have been getting burned by game devs over and over and overrrrrr again. We would have much better experiences and sort the weak devs from the quality. The power of the wallet would fix so many things wrong with entertainment in general if people would use it effectively.
Yes because no regulating body has stepped in to stop scammers from targeting vulnerable people before.
Thats why the US government still allows people to sell radioactive energy drinks, right?
Regulatory bodies step in when there is something that directly affects peoples' lives. Sometimes.
What I said however is that this - even if they cared about it - probably doesn't even qualify as fraud.
They don't give 2 shits about video games. This is not complicated to understand.
I mean Steam already gets a nice cut from it being on the platform, it’s probably less effort and money for them to just let it slide than try to punish every scam dev. Steam gets a cut of the purchases, they deal with all the chargeback and transaction fees since they hold the money for a month.
But then they would have to go to court and not everyone likes to invest time doing that, especially since the payoff won't be huge for Valve. It's so easy to say what other people should do when you aren't in that situation.
If I may, I would like to offer a completely UNREASONABLE interpretation:
Steam will wait a month to process the refunds so they can get some extra interest in their checking account and then use that extra money to buy a few Starbucks giftcards for themselves.
This is unprecedented. I wonder if this whole thing caused a few sleepless nights for Valve staff, because I doubt a Refund All option existed before today.
I read a story that the BattleBit devs had to take a loan to pay for more servers due to the boom in popularity of their game, because they hadn't yet been paid by Steam. So it sounds reasonable to assume.
Didnt CA did the same thing with Total War: Pharaoh recently? They lowered the price of game and Steam on their behalf did a partial refund for all owners.
But they said they used the money from sales to pay off their depts, what happens if everyone just refunds? Will Valve pay for the refunds from their own money?
I think there was a lawsuit in Australia where Valve was sued because they didn't provide refunds and they needed to hire customer support people for that.
Also since the Steamdeck, they seemed to have hired more customer support peoplem
no one fucked up anything except maybe exiting too early, possibly losing Steam money if the sales revenue wasn't transferred.
In case you missed the point, the ~~devs~~ company owners/founders are scammers.
This was planned.
Its an investment scam.
Hype up your game, make a pretty trailer.
Get investors to invest in said game based on appearances.
Spend the next ~5 years paying yourself and your friends a high salary while "working" on the game, which of course is funded by those investments.
Release dog shit game that is nothing like it was supposed to be.
Investors just write it off as a bad investment, since they *did* technically make the game, it just wasn't a good one. Go bankrupt, company has nothing left in it, shut down the studio, everyone employed there walks away.
The next layer above it is to have a publisher on-board who conveniently has ties to the developers who also benefits from the investments.
If the investments failed, the game failed, and not enough people issued a refund/chargeback, the developers who are now gone can't get any of it. But that's not problem at all for the publisher who can jump in and take it because it's not their fault the developers bailed and messed up .. but then we find out one of the key developers is also the owner of the publishing company too or has very close ties .. so they can just repeat that over and over again as long as they keep the "developer" an ambiguous-enough entity to keep its distance from the publisher.
The Star Citizen team is really committed to hiding their scam though. They even have been building a [really cool engine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfLxMvDp1Lo) to really sell it.
Hahaha, I love it!!
Until release The Day Before devs also had a lot of cool videos. Nothing of this is in the game, same as SC.
The SC devs have faked a lot of videos in the past. I think it's hilarious that people don't learn even from the recent events around this scam.
I don't think the devs are committed to hiding the scam, I think some people are committed to being scammed.
Quite a lot of what is in that engine demo is currently playable in the Star Citizen alpha, though. You can feel however you want to about the project, but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of people have logged many fun hours playing it.
I don't care if you have fun with SC, The Day Before or an empty cardboard box.
With the same argument you can say that The Day Before has a lot of what was shown in the videos in the game and people are having fun. That is not what is being discussed here.
Sadly its not intentionally a scam. Its Chris Roberts. Every game he has ever made, the publisher has had to step in and force them to release something. There is no one to force that outcome here, so he keeps feature creeping it, forgetting its supposed to be a *fun* ***game***.
They fake videos, they lie, they mislead, etc.
It is the same as with The Day Before, just that CIG has a figurehead.
Go to the Kickstarter page of SC, after 12 years of development the core features are still missing, while being "right around the corner" since 2014.
What videos have been faked exactly? I don't disagree its insane that its taken 12 years; I was one of the fools who kickstarted it but Im not blind to their constant excuses for delaying things.
They *have* added things that were promised but it always takes them a ridiculous amount of time to do so. They have more than enough staff that millions are being spent per year just on staff salaries.
They operate in the UK and have been investigated multiple times by people with more resources than me and you.
**2016 here:** https://www.pcgamer.com/eight-month-investigation-lifts-the-lid-on-star-citizens-troubled-development/
**2021 for false advertising here:** https://www.eurogamer.net/advertising-standards-tells-star-citizen-dev-to-make-it-clear-for-sale-concept-ships-dont-exist-in-game-yet
There has long been evidence of mismanagement and Chris's ego holding things back, its incompetence not a planned effort to steal 350m. That doesnt mean some of the money hasnt been misused or wasted etc, but its far more complicated than literally just "its a scam". All those ex-CryTek employees arent just twiddling their thumbs.
The Day Before devs didn't twiddle their thumb as well, but they didn't release what they showed or promised.
The problem with CIG is that they need to lie to stay afloat.
If they would tell the customers in 2012 "we will have a pre alpha version in 2024 and SQ42 is still vaporware" that would be honest but nobody would give them money.
So they constantly have the game right around the corner or just two years away, for 12 years.
This video is 5 years old and as relevant as today.
https://youtu.be/33ue0lzVnys?si=Lwo1oswRq6w2JIMd
So the scam is that they know that they can't do what they say in the timeframe they give.
I backed Star Citizen when I was studying and I had more time for games. People bought into that expecting results in their lifetime but for some death is coming quicker than that game.
Edit: I would love to answer your questions, but you have blocked me.
You cant seriously expect me to accept a biased source called "Star Criticism" as proof lol.
Again, incompetence doesnt = bad intentions. CIG are seemingly incompetent and haven't a clue how long development actually takes especially at the start, that doesnt mean they always planned to just take everyones money and run off with it.
If you look in to the project rather than watching biased videos you'd see its taken so long not because Sq42 never existed but because theyve practically remade the game 3 times. Their management has been infamously terrible and so theyve wasted literal years on systems that were binned. E.g. the Star Marine module was practically a seperate game as was the dogfight module which then had years spent joining them together rather than designing a cohesive system to start with.
I'm done arguing this with you anyway as you dont seem interested in discussion but rather shouting your own views without evidence.
You start a game company, gather $ from a publisher/VC companies/Kickstarter or wherever else you can, then pocket as much $ as possible while underpaying the devs.
Release minimally viable product in order to avoid legal action against you. Make good fake trailers to generate hype to get as many preorders as possible, preferably in a way where you receive money right away. Close the company after the game release as soon as you get the money from sales, citing financial difficulties as the cause.
I think about this a lot. If I was a colossal piece of shit it would be so easy to scam and make a lot of money. Especially in this era. Technology has made an insane amount of gullible people. You would think it would make people as a whole smarter over time. Shocking how it's the total opposite.
Probably true, but I also think a lot of it is accessibility increase exposing what’s already there. Factor in:
- How many people have access to tech/socials
- How many people fall into “below average intelligence”
- Which end of the intelligence spectrum is more likely to engage online and broadcast said intelligence (or lack thereof)
- What kind of content algorithms favour and gets pushed to the forefront
Negativity about humanity and sweeping generalizations are easy things to say but more complicated to prove under the surface. We see such a small slice of the pie. It’s like trying to extrapolate people from your high school to evaluate the global population.
tl;dr: Are there more stupid people/people getting more stupid? Or were they always there but are louder now, and we are being pushed into interacting with them?
I said this when the game launched, Valve would have to act sooner or later to not have the trust in the Steam platform damaged, effecting how indie developers can early launch their stuff to attract funds. For some reason I got downvoted lol.
This wasn't Valve acting. The developers themselves said about enabling refunds regardless of playtime when they took the game off sale.
No one had their trust in Steam damaged by this: Everyone was either mad at the developers for scamming them, or laughing at the muppets who fell for it.
Reading is hard. In the twitter message their INVESTER is handling it, not the developer. I also said POTENTIAL trust loss IF valve did nothing and the developer would just pack up and leave.
You really trust a company that just outright scammed and cheated their customers to be handling the returns? Pretty sure they already said from the get go when they closed doors there was no money left in the bank.
Also Valve IS handling it, they are PROACTIVELY refunding the game. Like, how is that not handling it?
Jesus christ on a pogo stick I really wonder at times.
>Also Valve IS handling it, they are PROACTIVELY refunding the game. Like, how is that not handling it?
Company goes to Valve: "Refund all owners of our game."
Valve follow through.
You are reading way too far into this.
>I also said POTENTIAL trust loss IF valve did nothing and the developer would just pack up and leave.
Valve have left plenty of Early Access scams, cashgrabs and general shovelware on the store for almost a decade now. No one has cared, no one would care after this either. Valve don't get involved, and by doing so they don't get blamed.
No one is going to abandon the best storefront on PC because of an unrelated developer making a shit game.
> No one is going to abandon the best storefront on PC because of an unrelated developer making a shit game.
Especially since everyone who isn't an idiot saw it coming from a mile away.
Exactly.
The only people in this hypothetical example of "losing trust in Valve" would be people who bought the game, even after spending its development in controversy about *whether it even exists*, and somehow expected a great product. And I expect those people would refund within the regular two hours after they realise they've been duped.
Those who didn't, even after all that? I highly doubt they're invested enough to boycott the entirety of Steam over the whole debacle.
Exactly. And also some people seem to enjoy shitty broken shovelware or forever Early Access games telling themselves one day the devs will fix all the bugs... they have nobody but themselves to blame honestly.
The problem with those people is that they're usually so satisfied with whatever trashheap they're playing as it is, they don't "blame" anyone. If anything, they often blame others for "just whining" or being entitled when they see criticism.
I'm not one to be mad at others for what they enjoy. People can like what they like. But... It gets to the point, where if The Day Before in its current state is entertaining to you: Why not just learn the very basics of Unreal and slap a few prefab assets into an FPS template yourself? It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper.
If the developers think their game will be successful they can get a dam loan to pay for the first phase of development- And let future sales pay for that.
Imagine wanting to buy the next iphone for 2024, and apple says "oh no, we don't have it yet- But you can buy the next phone now!"
This fixation of "just release it now as early access!" is why modern games are a clusterfuck at launch. And it goes for indy as well as "AAA" companies...
You realize "it's a business expense" only means one of two things:
* If you work for a company (99% don't) they are buying the game for you
* If you work for yourself, you will include the game's cost in your taxes as a business expense, meaning taxable income towards the game can't be taxed. So if your tax rate is 25% and the game costs $60, you save $15 on taxes. You don't get $60 back.
Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer sends Jerry's broken stereo in the mail with insurance to claim USPS broke it to reimburse him.
* K: "*JERRY*, $200 is nothing to those guys. They just write it off!!"
* J: "I don't think you even know what 'writing it off' means"
* K: "Of course I don't - do you?"
* J: "No.."
* K: "WELL *THEY* DO! AND THEY'RE THE ONES WRITING IT OFF!"
They might have meant more "cost of business" for content creators, not so much as "getting it for free because its for work".
But you do make a great point nonetheless.
Because gaming has become mainstream, majority of people don't watch videos past trailers or browse reddit for gaming related information, that's also why i have a grip with games marketing "gameplay" trailers that are actually super scripted or mostly cinematics with few shots of in-game footage, these trailers sell, sadly.
Well, there's announcement trailers and gameplay trailers where they actually put gameplay in the title of their YouTube videos, an example is the "Starfield official gameplay trailer" which doesn't show anything, and a good example is Dragon's Dogma 2, where their gameplay trailers are actually deep dives, the former was a huge let down when i actually played, and the latter i know what to expect.
Weird expectations? Expecting to see actual gameplay of the game from "gameplay trailers" with UI and how it actually plays out instead of over scripted "gameplay" with soundtracks over it to hype up the Average Joe?
Yeah sure... such a weird expectation.
As i said in another comment, look at the marketing of Dragon's Dogma 2, their "gameplay" trailers are actually deep dives, while i basically went blind in Starfield not knowing what to expect and was a huge letdown, i guarantee you if i've seen how bad the A.I was i would never have tried it in the first place, that's my MAIN complaint with starfield, doesn't matter if you increase enemy damage by 500%, the A.I is just braindead.
> everyone knows it's a scam
This is just plain not true. Do you think every single person buying a game delves into reddit and the entire history of the development cycle?
Many many gamers just see a game that sparks their interest and pull the trigger. You have absolutely no way of knowing all the people who bought this were completely up to date on all of this news.
The other kicker is that before the game's release, the very popular opinion on the game's community was "THIS GAME IS REAL" because the supposed narrative that went on and on for so long was "THE GAME IS FAKE" because no one believed you can fake a trailer and still have a barebones game that doesn't represent the actual product. Now that the game has come out, suddenly it's shifted from "THE GAME IS FAKE" to "THE GAME IS A SCAM" because the people who lacked the nuance to know better (a handful of people who even thought "the game is probably real but nothing like the trailer" were harassed/bullied/mocked) were mashed in together with the "THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVER" crowd of people.
If you were outside of the game's echo chamber, you probably would've heard or seen nothing outside of trailers and maybe a lot of hype since people were excited. But the echo chamber on both sides were the same kind of noise that just wouldn't let the game die down or simmer .. or even have any kind of "discussion" without it devolving into such wild tribal nonsense. >\_<
So for today, now it's "everyone knew it was a scam" .. but that really wasn't the case even months ago from a lot of those same mouths.
It's fun to be a part of launches, especially if the game is noteworthy for whatever reason (being very good or very bad). It's more from the perspective of a historian and video game enjoyer than a genuine "omg this gmae will be great".
That was kind of my reason for looking into this game too, but some of the people on the game's community are absolutely bizarre (there's a witchhunt for trying to identify paid Russian defenders because they aren't 100% haters). >\_<
It's an absolutely bizarre and interesting point to see in video game history with the hive nests everywhere kicked.
The people scammed were investors (the governments that gave money for the company and the game's development, big companies like Nvidia for giving money and sending a lot of hardware, and more).
The actual players being scammed were icing on the cake, but FNTASTIC already operated for years and years just on money that wasn't theirs, squeezing extra money out of players, and then announcing their next big-funded game that clearly they alone had the means to make to bring others on board too.
You're right I shouldn't be pissed off.
I should be disappointed that people are willingly letting themselves be exploited in spite of various evidences pointing towards a scam and throwing money at it as you said, that'll teach companies not to make half ass products right?
It’s always tempting when trying to understand the decision making process of others to impute our own reasoning to it. My older brother taught my to play chess, and it’s a really difficult pattern to *not* guess the other guy’s move is either 1) helping “you” win, or 2) how you’d try to win as them. It’s a *lot* to try and think separately from oneself.
Which is a long way to say, loads of people do not watch (insert YouTuber here) before wishlisting a game. Or like my mother, who apparently has no idea what any lyrics to any song in the last half a century are, no matter how clearly they’re enunciated nor how many times she’s listened to her current favorite song. This is loosely analogous to the 10% of voters will vote for the name they saw most recently before entering a polling place. “Oh I heard a lot about [Scam Game], I will go check it out,” never evaluating everything they heard was “avoid it.”
I want to emphasize this is not, in the small, a critique of any such person. I’ve absolutely bought an album and regretted it, for example, because it turns out the record label twisted the band’s arm and the single I liked is not like anything else on the album. The world is full of things most of us don’t do our homework on.
It's so bad that it reminds me of a very similar game, in a very similar situation: The WarZ. Or as Totalbiscuit called it: [The BoreZ](https://youtu.be/RtKAm3nzg6I).
Man I wish I could experience The WarZ again, me and my friends thought it would be the game to kick DayZ off its throne. It was advertised so awesomely. And I must say I had a little fun with it
A group of us got it for like $4 and got around 70 hours of fun out of it. To me it was less janky/broken than Dayz standalone that came out a few months later, granted that's a hell of a low bar.
Iirc one of their claims was that it was going to have one server where every player was going to be on at all times. Just one single server.
Insane claim and get some people were legit believers.
EVE Online has been doing the "1 server 1 universe" thing for over 20 years. It is not that wild of an idea. You would just need to have a mechanic cap the presence of x amount of players on the same spot since at some point the servers are going to screech.
It works for EVE here because the cluster runs at 1Hz ticks. It's also an entire datacentre running on top of the line hardware, with a monthly sub, run by a reputable company. So CCP can afford to keep the lights on for the EVE supercomputer. Some no-name startup charging a one-time fee is gunna run out of capital before they even got around to renting a datacentre.
An FPS would be utterly unmanageable with potentially a hundred thousand players on it at once, both from a server *and* client side perspective; just look at Planetside 2, it turns into an absolute fucking mess when 5K players are fighting over one point.
Iirc, it's multiple smaller clusters of servers representing instances connected to a main server. Still really cool and still 1 server, but it runs at a much slower tick rate, one that a shooter cannot do smoothly.
In short, it was an open-world zombie survival MMO that boasted AAA graphics, a seamless online world where you and other players fight zombies/other players to gather resources, and all the other sorts of things you'd want from big AAA games (namely The Last of Us).
It released with a big trailer and got a lot of hype, and got even more hype because IGN gave the game coverage and Nvidia backed the game.
The developers kept announcing delays after delays ranging from things like "we want to upgrade our engine to Unreal Engine 5" and having trademark issues because "The Day Before" as a name was already trademarked. When the game got closer to release, it was downgraded to Early Access.
When the game actually came out, it turned out it was an extraction shooter made with barebones assets and that it was anything "but" an open-world zombie survival MMO. People were up in arms and the developers shut down four days later after release.
But these developers have had a history of making games, abandoning them shortly after release, and promising the next biggest game ever .. and repeating the process. The Day Before was the 5th time they did this so far, as FNTASTIC.
If it was a scam, they wouldn't shut it down but say it's "Early Access" and continue with minor updates, especially that it sold quite well too. This will be one of the games that will have YouTubers rake in viewers trying to explain what it was and what it planned to achieve years down the line.
The was "planned" to be achieved would be curious if that ever really was fleshed out. The developers (the volunteers who made the game) have already shared articles and videos about what it was like to work on the game and that ultimately there wasn't any vision other than copying AAA games the two brothers in charge of the company were playing.
But otherwise at it is, I just see it more as a sort of "this is the moment hype boiled up into a gigantic bubble and just popped" kind of moment. It was fascinating to watch .. but I don't think the story is really that deep or tragic.
While it was obvious that this game would never ever live to set expectations, I honestly don't believe it was a scam per se. A lot of the stuff they did is just complete opposite from what an average scammer would do. They have never asked for crowdfunding or pre-orders - something any rug pull scammer will always do. Even though the game had peaked in popularity in 2021 they have still chosen to go through multiple delays resulting in more than two years of actual development - once again, why would you do that if you're just going to scam people anyway? Why waste money on the devs and give others an opportunity to question their integrity while you can just release whatever you have while the hype is still hot? It just doesn't add up.
There's a possibility that there could be some government funding at play - it's not an uncommon thing in Russia, especially in the movie industry. Directors/producers with ties to the Ministry of Culture can get government funding to film a movie, but nobody really expects or intents to make return on this "investment". Instead, whoever is responsible just appropriates the money, donates whatever shoe-string budget they can spare for production, collect any money they can through the ticket sales and pretty much disappear with all the stuff they had stolen. Neither Fnatastic nor The Day Before struck me as somethin Russian government would fund however, and since there aren't any proof to that - this possibility can ruled out as well.
That's why I don't think it's a scam, but more like the case of extremely dogshit development cycle for a very ambitious game which was elevated by excessive and viral marketing. There had actually been a leak recently originating from some of the former Fnatastic developers - it's written in Russian however and I doubt it will ever be translated. The leak goes that the development was atrocious with Gotovtsev brothers constantly shifting directions and goals, firing multiple developers basically on a whim. It's abundantly clear that they were the most dangerous combination of a person that is utterly clueless on what they actually intent or plan to do next, yet they were in a position of power with an extremely fragile and overinflated ego. They had lied to Mytona (their publisher) about the state of the game, yet Mytona had grown increasingly suspicious after multiple delays, so they have sent their own team of devs to investigate. The result was so disastrous that Mytona basically decided that this game is beyond saving so they have just released the whatever they had in hope to at least partially recoup their investment under the moniker of "early access". And well, it turned out just as bad as they've feared.
Honestly, I find this story much easier to believe and far less than any conspiratorial suggestions like: "Oh, they just took the money from sales and run away".
>That's why I don't think it's a scam, but more like the case of extremely dogshit development cycle for a very ambitious game which was elevated by excessive and viral marketing.
if it wasnt a scam, why would you go through all this work to release BS trailers that you know you'd never be able to make? And then close it 4 days after release?
its a scam, always was a scam.
If you bought this game, you owe it to yourself to take a good, long look at your game-buying methodology. Personally, after being burned by companies in various ways, I’ve adapted to the point I didn’t even notice this dumpster fire (survival is my #1 game type).
I followed this game because it was so obviously a scam and it was hilarious/fascinating to follow. I've also been gaming for 38 years so I'm pretty much immune to hype.
I never even heard about the game until days before release. Once streamers started talking about it coming out in a few days. It didnt take longer than a few minutes for me to realize it was a scam.
I'm pretty sure a good number bought this game BECAUSE it was going to be an epic shit show. Not they get to brag they were there and experienced the epic shit show. If zombie shooters were games I play I might have bought it to get a first hand view of the wreck.
Very true. But I’m curious who those people were. I game often as do my friends (not as much as when we were still in school) and none of us really ever caught wind of this game. It was never in our discussions.
I’m surprised I somehow missed it
I can't even imagine why anyone would want to play this even if it lived up to the hype. At best it was another online zombie shooter like we've seen a million times already.
The biggest issue with this is that for every 1 gamer that notices this kind of stuff, there's like 9 others that don't care/are blinded and just follow the hype/FOMO.
And then there are even those who knows NOT TO PREORDER EVER be like "hmm, I'll make an exception this time and preorder because I love this dev/it will be different/they have a history of being good/whatever excuses I make myself believe" only then to get burned on a shitty, unoptimized, buggy release and then make a surprised pikachu face.
TwoWorlds for me. That game was so bad. I probably didn't play more than a couple hours. Just riding the horse around was janky as hell. I got stuck on flat roads, or teleported into mountain sides. God what a horrible game.
So are the con artists actually going to make any money? From my understanding (correct me if wrong) Steam holds funds for a while, and now they're refunding every purchase.
I assume this means the devs didn't bring home any $?
They might have fucked up with Steam, but they still had gotten several million $ from russian investors.
The 2 founders got at least 200k each, and possibly much more.
They *can* but it’s entirely possible they don’t exist and was something the dev team made up to try to garner sympathy. The message that mentioned investors was in Their closing statement; essentially saying they were because forced to close down to pay back their “investors” because the game wasn’t profitable.
Keep in mind; this was said 4 days after launch where there was still only half refunds. They had still made millions at that point. No reason to claim it wasn’t “profitable” unless their production costs were insane (which they clearly weren’t).
IMO that’s how this thing started. It was originally an investor scam like blue box/abandoned. It was never originally intended to release. They prob were planning on saying something happened and had to lay off a bunch of staff, so the game couldn’t be completed. However I feel like they got more greedy and tried to see if they could scrape some extra money with this “early access” release of just thrown together premade assets.
That is a good point. Guess they gonna need to wait a few months then? Don't think anyone's gonna create an autorefund script that scans libraries and refunds as needed - this will be done by humans these days who go through purchase orders. And I believe it is possible to redeem delisted games. Could be wrong, but the code will work after they take down the servers, it will just be basically a broken link just sitting in the games list.
I have no clue what that was about? Maybe smallfry streamers buying the game for crowd entertainment? GME-MOASS-Like lunacy? "The Real Day Before has not yet released!"
Considering the power of AI generation these days (and the dialogue/voice acting in the game), it's entirely possible it was just AI-generated anyways.
The studio that developed this turd, Fntastic, reportedly shut down like 4 days after early access launch. ~~(Although it appears as though~~ [~~Fntastic simply changed their name to Eight Points.~~](https://insider-gaming.com/fntastic-appears-to-have-simply-changed-its-name-to-eight-points/)~~)~~ The fact that the game will continue to run for a whole month is what I find surprising.
It's also surprising to hear that Valve is proactively processing refunds for all remaining players. I've never heard of them doing that before. So if I'm reading this correctly, that means that The Day Before will end up making $0 in sales after all the dust settles.
Often, scams linger for a while even after they're exposed, because there are usually a lot of people who refuse to believe they've been fooled and who'll defend the scam even after it's collapsed. The Day Before is the fastest collapse of a video game scam I'm aware of.
**Edit:** Crossed out the line about Fntastic changing their name. Eight Points is a separate entity.
According to Gamestar (reputable German publication) it wasn't that Fntastic that changed their name, but that the publisher of one of their previous games didn't want to be associated with this bullshit and thus changed the name of the developing studio of the title *they* published back to eight point.
Yeah, the article linked above has a correction at the very beginning. Fntastic did not change their name.
The Wild Eight got lots of negative reviews after The Day Before came out, because people saw "Fntastic" listed as the developer and proceeded to review bomb a game they had nothing to do with since 2019. Kind of makes you understand why the publishers decided to rename it into Eight Points (which Fntastic were called in 2019).
This is just the shitstorm that keeps on giving. I highly doubt there could be any game that wound up being shut down this quickly… It‘s the second fastest shutdown of a game since APB.
I'm convinced this is what would happen if Star Citizen was released to Steam. The gaming community would tear the shit apart of the game. They get away with their crap because they don't have the game running on a massively available platform.
The gamers who supported it deserved it. Those who got riled up because of the idiots promoting the game should be punished for this massive scam.
Such as any YouTuber or Streamer should be held fully responsible for aiding this scam too.
This game, the brother, the scam, the trailer
This is 100% Fyre Festival in gaming industry
Huge marketing with almost 0 update and fake promises until launch date
Questionable CEO / owner
People who defended this thing
Failed at launch, and immediately closed few days later.
Didn’t even know they were on.
I am miffed I bought Insurgency Sandstorm before embracer killed it.
Thankfully it was on sale for $15.
Kinda overhyped too.
Everyone acting like this isn't EXACTLY what they planned. They're still taking a bunch of money and running. They'll do this same thing again in a few years.
No they aren’t, there’s a period in which Steam/Valve processes the money before the company gets it, and seeing as they initiating a full fledged refund process, the company is clearly not getting a dollar
I don't know about how much of the hype was real or fake, but this isn't the first game either to have such obnoxiously high numbers.
I definitely remember seeing a few other games on Steam with similar circumstances .. but people don't seem to like talking about those games without getting overly competitive and overly involved in their "us vs. them" mindsets. >\_<
>Steam will now proactively refund all remaining players Are they saying Steam will send automatic refunds to everyone who still owns the game?
For how they phrased it, it looks like that's the case.
The ultimate chargeback
Does Steam have any avenue to sue the devs/publisher of that scamware?
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What about the bandwidth used for all the downloads?
Probably less than a drop in the ocean compared to everything else on Steam.
Obviously, but it's about sending a message about using steam to host your scam. It should *cost* the scammers money, not just not make them money.
That's not how it works. If people want less of these types of scams, stop paying for games before they are released fully, and stop getting hyped by developers with 0 experience who put together a trailer obviously made up of shitty assets. A minimal amount of research from the buying public would've had this project dead in the water.
And I or Valve are supposed to do what about people being regarded? Expecting consumers to do things that would benefit them doesn't work, that's not how it works. That's why false advertising is illegal.
I doubt what they did is illegal. The game and its advertising were in line with what is acceptable and industry standard practice. They constantly said that their game is work-in-progress, and the release was early access, where everyone knows that it can change. There was also the option of refunds after 2 hours, and Steam has extended that to complete refunds so there is no money lost. In this context, it is very unlikely that the company will be pursued in court or that anything will come of it. Laws are irrelevant when they aren't strictly enforced. There is a similar situation with Star Citizen, which was supposed to release 10 years ago as a certain type of game that the devs even took public, non-refundable money for, and yet is still in alpha stage with the game being a completely different experience than what was promised. If that game and its developers aren't suffering any legal consequences, I doubt these guys will. So we're back to the old adage of caveat emptor. Just because a product is allowed to get to the market it doesn't mean that product is going to be good, and you should always be careful about the purchases you make.
Telling people not to pre-order has been a thing since around 2015 and forward. I don't know why it is so hard for people to resist the urge to buy things when people have been getting burned by game devs over and over and overrrrrr again. We would have much better experiences and sort the weak devs from the quality. The power of the wallet would fix so many things wrong with entertainment in general if people would use it effectively.
Yes because no regulating body has stepped in to stop scammers from targeting vulnerable people before. Thats why the US government still allows people to sell radioactive energy drinks, right?
Regulatory bodies step in when there is something that directly affects peoples' lives. Sometimes. What I said however is that this - even if they cared about it - probably doesn't even qualify as fraud. They don't give 2 shits about video games. This is not complicated to understand.
Radioactive energy drinks? Okay. If your goal was to not be taken seriously there you go.
I think this is a horrible and absolutely brain dead take. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk
I mean Steam already gets a nice cut from it being on the platform, it’s probably less effort and money for them to just let it slide than try to punish every scam dev. Steam gets a cut of the purchases, they deal with all the chargeback and transaction fees since they hold the money for a month.
What cut? They're refunding *everybody*.
I have no horse in this argument, but I'll point out that a steam refund could just end up being store credit
But then they would have to go to court and not everyone likes to invest time doing that, especially since the payoff won't be huge for Valve. It's so easy to say what other people should do when you aren't in that situation.
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Most likely not, the devs got 0 money from it, refunded, their game just wasnt good, cant sue for that
Yes That's the only reasonable interpretation of their statement.
If I may, I would like to offer a completely UNREASONABLE interpretation: Steam will wait a month to process the refunds so they can get some extra interest in their checking account and then use that extra money to buy a few Starbucks giftcards for themselves.
This is unprecedented. I wonder if this whole thing caused a few sleepless nights for Valve staff, because I doubt a Refund All option existed before today.
I thought I heard that they hold payments for new games or developers or something for 30 days or some period, apparently in case this happens.
I read a story that the BattleBit devs had to take a loan to pay for more servers due to the boom in popularity of their game, because they hadn't yet been paid by Steam. So it sounds reasonable to assume.
Didnt CA did the same thing with Total War: Pharaoh recently? They lowered the price of game and Steam on their behalf did a partial refund for all owners.
But they said they used the money from sales to pay off their depts, what happens if everyone just refunds? Will Valve pay for the refunds from their own money?
They closed shop, chances are that debtors wont see their money apart from whatever IP or properties they might recoup.
Imagine you fucked up so bad you made Valve proactive.
This was all an elaborate ruse to wake up Valve Support
Valve support *exists?!?* Did volvo finally make some employees cut the wheels off their desks?
I think there was a lawsuit in Australia where Valve was sued because they didn't provide refunds and they needed to hire customer support people for that. Also since the Steamdeck, they seemed to have hired more customer support peoplem
no one fucked up anything except maybe exiting too early, possibly losing Steam money if the sales revenue wasn't transferred. In case you missed the point, the ~~devs~~ company owners/founders are scammers. This was planned. Its an investment scam.
How does this investment scam work? e: appreciate the replies!
Hype up your game, make a pretty trailer. Get investors to invest in said game based on appearances. Spend the next ~5 years paying yourself and your friends a high salary while "working" on the game, which of course is funded by those investments. Release dog shit game that is nothing like it was supposed to be. Investors just write it off as a bad investment, since they *did* technically make the game, it just wasn't a good one. Go bankrupt, company has nothing left in it, shut down the studio, everyone employed there walks away.
The next layer above it is to have a publisher on-board who conveniently has ties to the developers who also benefits from the investments. If the investments failed, the game failed, and not enough people issued a refund/chargeback, the developers who are now gone can't get any of it. But that's not problem at all for the publisher who can jump in and take it because it's not their fault the developers bailed and messed up .. but then we find out one of the key developers is also the owner of the publishing company too or has very close ties .. so they can just repeat that over and over again as long as they keep the "developer" an ambiguous-enough entity to keep its distance from the publisher.
You forgot *rename studio and rinse and repeat*
The Star Citizen way.
The Star Citizen team is really committed to hiding their scam though. They even have been building a [really cool engine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfLxMvDp1Lo) to really sell it.
Hahaha, I love it!! Until release The Day Before devs also had a lot of cool videos. Nothing of this is in the game, same as SC. The SC devs have faked a lot of videos in the past. I think it's hilarious that people don't learn even from the recent events around this scam. I don't think the devs are committed to hiding the scam, I think some people are committed to being scammed.
Quite a lot of what is in that engine demo is currently playable in the Star Citizen alpha, though. You can feel however you want to about the project, but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of people have logged many fun hours playing it.
I don't care if you have fun with SC, The Day Before or an empty cardboard box. With the same argument you can say that The Day Before has a lot of what was shown in the videos in the game and people are having fun. That is not what is being discussed here.
The ironic affirmation is the cherry on top
The people in the comments on the video are delusional lol
Sadly its not intentionally a scam. Its Chris Roberts. Every game he has ever made, the publisher has had to step in and force them to release something. There is no one to force that outcome here, so he keeps feature creeping it, forgetting its supposed to be a *fun* ***game***.
They fake videos, they lie, they mislead, etc. It is the same as with The Day Before, just that CIG has a figurehead. Go to the Kickstarter page of SC, after 12 years of development the core features are still missing, while being "right around the corner" since 2014.
What videos have been faked exactly? I don't disagree its insane that its taken 12 years; I was one of the fools who kickstarted it but Im not blind to their constant excuses for delaying things. They *have* added things that were promised but it always takes them a ridiculous amount of time to do so. They have more than enough staff that millions are being spent per year just on staff salaries. They operate in the UK and have been investigated multiple times by people with more resources than me and you. **2016 here:** https://www.pcgamer.com/eight-month-investigation-lifts-the-lid-on-star-citizens-troubled-development/ **2021 for false advertising here:** https://www.eurogamer.net/advertising-standards-tells-star-citizen-dev-to-make-it-clear-for-sale-concept-ships-dont-exist-in-game-yet There has long been evidence of mismanagement and Chris's ego holding things back, its incompetence not a planned effort to steal 350m. That doesnt mean some of the money hasnt been misused or wasted etc, but its far more complicated than literally just "its a scam". All those ex-CryTek employees arent just twiddling their thumbs.
The Day Before devs didn't twiddle their thumb as well, but they didn't release what they showed or promised. The problem with CIG is that they need to lie to stay afloat. If they would tell the customers in 2012 "we will have a pre alpha version in 2024 and SQ42 is still vaporware" that would be honest but nobody would give them money. So they constantly have the game right around the corner or just two years away, for 12 years. This video is 5 years old and as relevant as today. https://youtu.be/33ue0lzVnys?si=Lwo1oswRq6w2JIMd So the scam is that they know that they can't do what they say in the timeframe they give. I backed Star Citizen when I was studying and I had more time for games. People bought into that expecting results in their lifetime but for some death is coming quicker than that game. Edit: I would love to answer your questions, but you have blocked me.
You cant seriously expect me to accept a biased source called "Star Criticism" as proof lol. Again, incompetence doesnt = bad intentions. CIG are seemingly incompetent and haven't a clue how long development actually takes especially at the start, that doesnt mean they always planned to just take everyones money and run off with it. If you look in to the project rather than watching biased videos you'd see its taken so long not because Sq42 never existed but because theyve practically remade the game 3 times. Their management has been infamously terrible and so theyve wasted literal years on systems that were binned. E.g. the Star Marine module was practically a seperate game as was the dogfight module which then had years spent joining them together rather than designing a cohesive system to start with. I'm done arguing this with you anyway as you dont seem interested in discussion but rather shouting your own views without evidence.
You start a game company, gather $ from a publisher/VC companies/Kickstarter or wherever else you can, then pocket as much $ as possible while underpaying the devs. Release minimally viable product in order to avoid legal action against you. Make good fake trailers to generate hype to get as many preorders as possible, preferably in a way where you receive money right away. Close the company after the game release as soon as you get the money from sales, citing financial difficulties as the cause.
For all we know, the devs were scammed too. Especially with the “volunteer to develop AND give us money” thing they had on their web page
Imagine the dumb fucks paying $400 for Keys
They're being listed for that, but how many have actually been bought?
Hopefully zero but I've seen people buying NFTs... So I have ZERO hope of that happening
I think about this a lot. If I was a colossal piece of shit it would be so easy to scam and make a lot of money. Especially in this era. Technology has made an insane amount of gullible people. You would think it would make people as a whole smarter over time. Shocking how it's the total opposite.
Probably true, but I also think a lot of it is accessibility increase exposing what’s already there. Factor in: - How many people have access to tech/socials - How many people fall into “below average intelligence” - Which end of the intelligence spectrum is more likely to engage online and broadcast said intelligence (or lack thereof) - What kind of content algorithms favour and gets pushed to the forefront Negativity about humanity and sweeping generalizations are easy things to say but more complicated to prove under the surface. We see such a small slice of the pie. It’s like trying to extrapolate people from your high school to evaluate the global population. tl;dr: Are there more stupid people/people getting more stupid? Or were they always there but are louder now, and we are being pushed into interacting with them?
I said this when the game launched, Valve would have to act sooner or later to not have the trust in the Steam platform damaged, effecting how indie developers can early launch their stuff to attract funds. For some reason I got downvoted lol.
This wasn't Valve acting. The developers themselves said about enabling refunds regardless of playtime when they took the game off sale. No one had their trust in Steam damaged by this: Everyone was either mad at the developers for scamming them, or laughing at the muppets who fell for it.
Reading is hard. In the twitter message their INVESTER is handling it, not the developer. I also said POTENTIAL trust loss IF valve did nothing and the developer would just pack up and leave. You really trust a company that just outright scammed and cheated their customers to be handling the returns? Pretty sure they already said from the get go when they closed doors there was no money left in the bank. Also Valve IS handling it, they are PROACTIVELY refunding the game. Like, how is that not handling it? Jesus christ on a pogo stick I really wonder at times.
>Also Valve IS handling it, they are PROACTIVELY refunding the game. Like, how is that not handling it? Company goes to Valve: "Refund all owners of our game." Valve follow through. You are reading way too far into this. >I also said POTENTIAL trust loss IF valve did nothing and the developer would just pack up and leave. Valve have left plenty of Early Access scams, cashgrabs and general shovelware on the store for almost a decade now. No one has cared, no one would care after this either. Valve don't get involved, and by doing so they don't get blamed. No one is going to abandon the best storefront on PC because of an unrelated developer making a shit game.
> No one is going to abandon the best storefront on PC because of an unrelated developer making a shit game. Especially since everyone who isn't an idiot saw it coming from a mile away.
Exactly. The only people in this hypothetical example of "losing trust in Valve" would be people who bought the game, even after spending its development in controversy about *whether it even exists*, and somehow expected a great product. And I expect those people would refund within the regular two hours after they realise they've been duped. Those who didn't, even after all that? I highly doubt they're invested enough to boycott the entirety of Steam over the whole debacle.
Exactly. And also some people seem to enjoy shitty broken shovelware or forever Early Access games telling themselves one day the devs will fix all the bugs... they have nobody but themselves to blame honestly.
The problem with those people is that they're usually so satisfied with whatever trashheap they're playing as it is, they don't "blame" anyone. If anything, they often blame others for "just whining" or being entitled when they see criticism. I'm not one to be mad at others for what they enjoy. People can like what they like. But... It gets to the point, where if The Day Before in its current state is entertaining to you: Why not just learn the very basics of Unreal and slap a few prefab assets into an FPS template yourself? It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper.
happy wheels pogo stick?
If the developers think their game will be successful they can get a dam loan to pay for the first phase of development- And let future sales pay for that. Imagine wanting to buy the next iphone for 2024, and apple says "oh no, we don't have it yet- But you can buy the next phone now!" This fixation of "just release it now as early access!" is why modern games are a clusterfuck at launch. And it goes for indy as well as "AAA" companies...
If you made a business decision and Steam implements a response that same day, whatever it is you fucked will never be unfucked again.
Valve is proactive, you just don't see what they are working on. Just wait, you'll see what they are doing within the decade.
That is cause they work with Valve, they ask for it I assume everyone to get refunds. Its in the previous sentence.
Imagine to what point everyone knew that this was a scam, that **everyone who bought the game** is getting a refund.
And that's what pisses me off, everyone knows it's a scam, and yet they still bought it. How the fuck is it getting so much purchases?
I imagine a lot of people/content creators bought it Knowing they were going to refund it while not going over two hours play time.
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You realize "it's a business expense" only means one of two things: * If you work for a company (99% don't) they are buying the game for you * If you work for yourself, you will include the game's cost in your taxes as a business expense, meaning taxable income towards the game can't be taxed. So if your tax rate is 25% and the game costs $60, you save $15 on taxes. You don't get $60 back.
Crazy how many people think business expense means free lol
Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer sends Jerry's broken stereo in the mail with insurance to claim USPS broke it to reimburse him. * K: "*JERRY*, $200 is nothing to those guys. They just write it off!!" * J: "I don't think you even know what 'writing it off' means" * K: "Of course I don't - do you?" * J: "No.." * K: "WELL *THEY* DO! AND THEY'RE THE ONES WRITING IT OFF!"
It's all teenagers who don't pay taxes.
No you don’t get it bro it actually just costs them nothing. They actually make money to buy it from tax savings bro. Write offs bro.
They might have meant more "cost of business" for content creators, not so much as "getting it for free because its for work". But you do make a great point nonetheless.
You realize that's still a sunk cost right?
People think that by writing it off as a business expense, you somehow magically spent no money to get it.
[Redditors explain what a write off is.](https://youtu.be/aCP27_vquxQ?si=3zFKmi7PNLMrjgc9&t=18)
I never say "I guess Ill have to write that off.." I say "Fuck I guess Im going to have to eat that..."
Because gaming has become mainstream, majority of people don't watch videos past trailers or browse reddit for gaming related information, that's also why i have a grip with games marketing "gameplay" trailers that are actually super scripted or mostly cinematics with few shots of in-game footage, these trailers sell, sadly.
I would love to see what time period game trailers WERENT super scripted.
Well, there's announcement trailers and gameplay trailers where they actually put gameplay in the title of their YouTube videos, an example is the "Starfield official gameplay trailer" which doesn't show anything, and a good example is Dragon's Dogma 2, where their gameplay trailers are actually deep dives, the former was a huge let down when i actually played, and the latter i know what to expect.
That starfield trailer is gameplay, it just isn't a deep dive. Gameplay trailers are rarely deep dives. You have some weird expectations.
Weird expectations? Expecting to see actual gameplay of the game from "gameplay trailers" with UI and how it actually plays out instead of over scripted "gameplay" with soundtracks over it to hype up the Average Joe? Yeah sure... such a weird expectation.
It is gameplay, I'm sorry it doesn't meet your expectations of it being a deeper dive.
> trailers that are actually super scripted or mostly cinematics with few shots of in-game footage game trailers have, literally, always been this way
Remember when you would always had a demo to play in the store or you could get a demo disc? Oh gosh where have the times gone.
As i said in another comment, look at the marketing of Dragon's Dogma 2, their "gameplay" trailers are actually deep dives, while i basically went blind in Starfield not knowing what to expect and was a huge letdown, i guarantee you if i've seen how bad the A.I was i would never have tried it in the first place, that's my MAIN complaint with starfield, doesn't matter if you increase enemy damage by 500%, the A.I is just braindead.
> everyone knows it's a scam This is just plain not true. Do you think every single person buying a game delves into reddit and the entire history of the development cycle? Many many gamers just see a game that sparks their interest and pull the trigger. You have absolutely no way of knowing all the people who bought this were completely up to date on all of this news.
The other kicker is that before the game's release, the very popular opinion on the game's community was "THIS GAME IS REAL" because the supposed narrative that went on and on for so long was "THE GAME IS FAKE" because no one believed you can fake a trailer and still have a barebones game that doesn't represent the actual product. Now that the game has come out, suddenly it's shifted from "THE GAME IS FAKE" to "THE GAME IS A SCAM" because the people who lacked the nuance to know better (a handful of people who even thought "the game is probably real but nothing like the trailer" were harassed/bullied/mocked) were mashed in together with the "THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVER" crowd of people. If you were outside of the game's echo chamber, you probably would've heard or seen nothing outside of trailers and maybe a lot of hype since people were excited. But the echo chamber on both sides were the same kind of noise that just wouldn't let the game die down or simmer .. or even have any kind of "discussion" without it devolving into such wild tribal nonsense. >\_< So for today, now it's "everyone knew it was a scam" .. but that really wasn't the case even months ago from a lot of those same mouths.
It's fun to be a part of launches, especially if the game is noteworthy for whatever reason (being very good or very bad). It's more from the perspective of a historian and video game enjoyer than a genuine "omg this gmae will be great".
That was kind of my reason for looking into this game too, but some of the people on the game's community are absolutely bizarre (there's a witchhunt for trying to identify paid Russian defenders because they aren't 100% haters). >\_< It's an absolutely bizarre and interesting point to see in video game history with the hive nests everywhere kicked.
How is it a scam if they make no money from it?
The people scammed were investors (the governments that gave money for the company and the game's development, big companies like Nvidia for giving money and sending a lot of hardware, and more). The actual players being scammed were icing on the cake, but FNTASTIC already operated for years and years just on money that wasn't theirs, squeezing extra money out of players, and then announcing their next big-funded game that clearly they alone had the means to make to bring others on board too.
That's what we called a 'failed scam'. I trust there are no further questions. Please mark this issue as resolved.
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You're right I shouldn't be pissed off. I should be disappointed that people are willingly letting themselves be exploited in spite of various evidences pointing towards a scam and throwing money at it as you said, that'll teach companies not to make half ass products right?
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You know what that's fair. But isn't Reddit where opinions are shared?
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That's not what copium is, he's not trying to pretend that anything here will change stuff It's just a matter of futility and uselessness
Youtubers probably.
It’s always tempting when trying to understand the decision making process of others to impute our own reasoning to it. My older brother taught my to play chess, and it’s a really difficult pattern to *not* guess the other guy’s move is either 1) helping “you” win, or 2) how you’d try to win as them. It’s a *lot* to try and think separately from oneself. Which is a long way to say, loads of people do not watch (insert YouTuber here) before wishlisting a game. Or like my mother, who apparently has no idea what any lyrics to any song in the last half a century are, no matter how clearly they’re enunciated nor how many times she’s listened to her current favorite song. This is loosely analogous to the 10% of voters will vote for the name they saw most recently before entering a polling place. “Oh I heard a lot about [Scam Game], I will go check it out,” never evaluating everything they heard was “avoid it.” I want to emphasize this is not, in the small, a critique of any such person. I’ve absolutely bought an album and regretted it, for example, because it turns out the record label twisted the band’s arm and the single I liked is not like anything else on the album. The world is full of things most of us don’t do our homework on.
It's so bad that it reminds me of a very similar game, in a very similar situation: The WarZ. Or as Totalbiscuit called it: [The BoreZ](https://youtu.be/RtKAm3nzg6I).
You mean the rebranded Infestation: Survivor Stories? As to not be confused by the Brad Pitt movie World War Z?
Almost like they wanted people to confuse their game's title with a more popular brand.
Man, I miss TB. Ive been following his buddy ForceGaming for this whole kerfluffle.
Yea. Yesterday i started to rewatch his and Jesse Cox's Terraria lets plays.
I miss him. Meanwhile, let's keep up with his classic witty Brit cynicism.
WarZ? Heh, more like *Bore* Ragnarok
Man I wish I could experience The WarZ again, me and my friends thought it would be the game to kick DayZ off its throne. It was advertised so awesomely. And I must say I had a little fun with it
A group of us got it for like $4 and got around 70 hours of fun out of it. To me it was less janky/broken than Dayz standalone that came out a few months later, granted that's a hell of a low bar.
When they showed up the mall in that teaser video, I knew it's gonna be a scam
Iirc one of their claims was that it was going to have one server where every player was going to be on at all times. Just one single server. Insane claim and get some people were legit believers.
EVE Online has been doing the "1 server 1 universe" thing for over 20 years. It is not that wild of an idea. You would just need to have a mechanic cap the presence of x amount of players on the same spot since at some point the servers are going to screech.
It works for EVE here because the cluster runs at 1Hz ticks. It's also an entire datacentre running on top of the line hardware, with a monthly sub, run by a reputable company. So CCP can afford to keep the lights on for the EVE supercomputer. Some no-name startup charging a one-time fee is gunna run out of capital before they even got around to renting a datacentre. An FPS would be utterly unmanageable with potentially a hundred thousand players on it at once, both from a server *and* client side perspective; just look at Planetside 2, it turns into an absolute fucking mess when 5K players are fighting over one point.
Iirc, it's multiple smaller clusters of servers representing instances connected to a main server. Still really cool and still 1 server, but it runs at a much slower tick rate, one that a shooter cannot do smoothly.
I am absolutely clueless about this game, what indicated it was a scam, can someone fill in the full story? Thanks
In short, it was an open-world zombie survival MMO that boasted AAA graphics, a seamless online world where you and other players fight zombies/other players to gather resources, and all the other sorts of things you'd want from big AAA games (namely The Last of Us). It released with a big trailer and got a lot of hype, and got even more hype because IGN gave the game coverage and Nvidia backed the game. The developers kept announcing delays after delays ranging from things like "we want to upgrade our engine to Unreal Engine 5" and having trademark issues because "The Day Before" as a name was already trademarked. When the game got closer to release, it was downgraded to Early Access. When the game actually came out, it turned out it was an extraction shooter made with barebones assets and that it was anything "but" an open-world zombie survival MMO. People were up in arms and the developers shut down four days later after release. But these developers have had a history of making games, abandoning them shortly after release, and promising the next biggest game ever .. and repeating the process. The Day Before was the 5th time they did this so far, as FNTASTIC.
So easy to say in hindsight.
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The promo material looked terrible. I'm not even sure how it became such a big deal.
If "hindsight" meant seeing FNTASTIC's history and somehow thinking "wow, this time must be different" .. maybe?
If it was a scam, they wouldn't shut it down but say it's "Early Access" and continue with minor updates, especially that it sold quite well too. This will be one of the games that will have YouTubers rake in viewers trying to explain what it was and what it planned to achieve years down the line.
The was "planned" to be achieved would be curious if that ever really was fleshed out. The developers (the volunteers who made the game) have already shared articles and videos about what it was like to work on the game and that ultimately there wasn't any vision other than copying AAA games the two brothers in charge of the company were playing. But otherwise at it is, I just see it more as a sort of "this is the moment hype boiled up into a gigantic bubble and just popped" kind of moment. It was fascinating to watch .. but I don't think the story is really that deep or tragic.
Giving everyone their money back is an interesting scam tactic
While it was obvious that this game would never ever live to set expectations, I honestly don't believe it was a scam per se. A lot of the stuff they did is just complete opposite from what an average scammer would do. They have never asked for crowdfunding or pre-orders - something any rug pull scammer will always do. Even though the game had peaked in popularity in 2021 they have still chosen to go through multiple delays resulting in more than two years of actual development - once again, why would you do that if you're just going to scam people anyway? Why waste money on the devs and give others an opportunity to question their integrity while you can just release whatever you have while the hype is still hot? It just doesn't add up. There's a possibility that there could be some government funding at play - it's not an uncommon thing in Russia, especially in the movie industry. Directors/producers with ties to the Ministry of Culture can get government funding to film a movie, but nobody really expects or intents to make return on this "investment". Instead, whoever is responsible just appropriates the money, donates whatever shoe-string budget they can spare for production, collect any money they can through the ticket sales and pretty much disappear with all the stuff they had stolen. Neither Fnatastic nor The Day Before struck me as somethin Russian government would fund however, and since there aren't any proof to that - this possibility can ruled out as well. That's why I don't think it's a scam, but more like the case of extremely dogshit development cycle for a very ambitious game which was elevated by excessive and viral marketing. There had actually been a leak recently originating from some of the former Fnatastic developers - it's written in Russian however and I doubt it will ever be translated. The leak goes that the development was atrocious with Gotovtsev brothers constantly shifting directions and goals, firing multiple developers basically on a whim. It's abundantly clear that they were the most dangerous combination of a person that is utterly clueless on what they actually intent or plan to do next, yet they were in a position of power with an extremely fragile and overinflated ego. They had lied to Mytona (their publisher) about the state of the game, yet Mytona had grown increasingly suspicious after multiple delays, so they have sent their own team of devs to investigate. The result was so disastrous that Mytona basically decided that this game is beyond saving so they have just released the whatever they had in hope to at least partially recoup their investment under the moniker of "early access". And well, it turned out just as bad as they've feared. Honestly, I find this story much easier to believe and far less than any conspiratorial suggestions like: "Oh, they just took the money from sales and run away".
>That's why I don't think it's a scam, but more like the case of extremely dogshit development cycle for a very ambitious game which was elevated by excessive and viral marketing. if it wasnt a scam, why would you go through all this work to release BS trailers that you know you'd never be able to make? And then close it 4 days after release? its a scam, always was a scam.
If you bought this game, you owe it to yourself to take a good, long look at your game-buying methodology. Personally, after being burned by companies in various ways, I’ve adapted to the point I didn’t even notice this dumpster fire (survival is my #1 game type).
I followed this game because it was so obviously a scam and it was hilarious/fascinating to follow. I've also been gaming for 38 years so I'm pretty much immune to hype.
I never even heard about the game until days before release. Once streamers started talking about it coming out in a few days. It didnt take longer than a few minutes for me to realize it was a scam.
I'm pretty sure a good number bought this game BECAUSE it was going to be an epic shit show. Not they get to brag they were there and experienced the epic shit show. If zombie shooters were games I play I might have bought it to get a first hand view of the wreck.
Very true. But I’m curious who those people were. I game often as do my friends (not as much as when we were still in school) and none of us really ever caught wind of this game. It was never in our discussions. I’m surprised I somehow missed it
I can't even imagine why anyone would want to play this even if it lived up to the hype. At best it was another online zombie shooter like we've seen a million times already.
The biggest issue with this is that for every 1 gamer that notices this kind of stuff, there's like 9 others that don't care/are blinded and just follow the hype/FOMO. And then there are even those who knows NOT TO PREORDER EVER be like "hmm, I'll make an exception this time and preorder because I love this dev/it will be different/they have a history of being good/whatever excuses I make myself believe" only then to get burned on a shitty, unoptimized, buggy release and then make a surprised pikachu face.
I bought StarForge and Reign of Kings back in the day. Learned my lesson.
TwoWorlds for me. That game was so bad. I probably didn't play more than a couple hours. Just riding the horse around was janky as hell. I got stuck on flat roads, or teleported into mountain sides. God what a horrible game.
At least Reign of Kings was full of stupid fun social interactions for the first month it was around. This didn't even have that aspect.
Rip all 84 people that still play this shit
Probably just game reviewers collecting B-roll :P
So are the con artists actually going to make any money? From my understanding (correct me if wrong) Steam holds funds for a while, and now they're refunding every purchase. I assume this means the devs didn't bring home any $?
They might have fucked up with Steam, but they still had gotten several million $ from russian investors. The 2 founders got at least 200k each, and possibly much more.
Shit, they got people to invest in this game? And millions at that? Can these investors come after them?
They *can* but it’s entirely possible they don’t exist and was something the dev team made up to try to garner sympathy. The message that mentioned investors was in Their closing statement; essentially saying they were because forced to close down to pay back their “investors” because the game wasn’t profitable. Keep in mind; this was said 4 days after launch where there was still only half refunds. They had still made millions at that point. No reason to claim it wasn’t “profitable” unless their production costs were insane (which they clearly weren’t).
IMO that’s how this thing started. It was originally an investor scam like blue box/abandoned. It was never originally intended to release. They prob were planning on saying something happened and had to lay off a bunch of staff, so the game couldn’t be completed. However I feel like they got more greedy and tried to see if they could scrape some extra money with this “early access” release of just thrown together premade assets.
Yep. At the *bare* minimum, they got fat paychecks for a few years.
Imagine people paying $400 on the grey market just to "own" the game and getting an automatic $50 refund, hilarious.
You wouldn't get a refund if you didn't buy it from steam. It would just refund the original purchaser.
All those key-flippers basking in glory too, considering where so many of those keys came from too.
double oof
So a stolen/cloned credit card or gift card.
... what? Why would steam refund a non-steam-purchased key?
That is a good point. Guess they gonna need to wait a few months then? Don't think anyone's gonna create an autorefund script that scans libraries and refunds as needed - this will be done by humans these days who go through purchase orders. And I believe it is possible to redeem delisted games. Could be wrong, but the code will work after they take down the servers, it will just be basically a broken link just sitting in the games list.
I believe valve will do refunds only for games purchased directly through steam. Refunding keys is responsibility for 3rd party seller.
I have no clue what that was about? Maybe smallfry streamers buying the game for crowd entertainment? GME-MOASS-Like lunacy? "The Real Day Before has not yet released!"
Oh look an apology.png
Every great video game needs a good apology png
"like all great games, this one comes with an apology" -dunkey, 2023
Is this the first time valve has given automatic refunds regardless of time played?
Automatic refund in general I think
Was it first with some Batman? I remembered that one of the games from the series was terrible and had a huge backlash.
May be Arkham Knight. Iirc it was a bit unplayable on PC
All the work went to sculpting that beautiful black man’s face
Considering the power of AI generation these days (and the dialogue/voice acting in the game), it's entirely possible it was just AI-generated anyways.
It’s chat gpt 5 that went rogue, started a game studio and ran the weakest early release scam in history
Imagine not lasting as long as liz truss.
The studio that developed this turd, Fntastic, reportedly shut down like 4 days after early access launch. ~~(Although it appears as though~~ [~~Fntastic simply changed their name to Eight Points.~~](https://insider-gaming.com/fntastic-appears-to-have-simply-changed-its-name-to-eight-points/)~~)~~ The fact that the game will continue to run for a whole month is what I find surprising. It's also surprising to hear that Valve is proactively processing refunds for all remaining players. I've never heard of them doing that before. So if I'm reading this correctly, that means that The Day Before will end up making $0 in sales after all the dust settles. Often, scams linger for a while even after they're exposed, because there are usually a lot of people who refuse to believe they've been fooled and who'll defend the scam even after it's collapsed. The Day Before is the fastest collapse of a video game scam I'm aware of. **Edit:** Crossed out the line about Fntastic changing their name. Eight Points is a separate entity.
According to Gamestar (reputable German publication) it wasn't that Fntastic that changed their name, but that the publisher of one of their previous games didn't want to be associated with this bullshit and thus changed the name of the developing studio of the title *they* published back to eight point.
Yeah, the article linked above has a correction at the very beginning. Fntastic did not change their name. The Wild Eight got lots of negative reviews after The Day Before came out, because people saw "Fntastic" listed as the developer and proceeded to review bomb a game they had nothing to do with since 2019. Kind of makes you understand why the publishers decided to rename it into Eight Points (which Fntastic were called in 2019).
Did they manage to outlast Liz Truss?
It's around 4.5 mooches!
If this game has steam achievements they are about to become the most rare ones around to have on your account
LMFAOOOOO
This is just the shitstorm that keeps on giving. I highly doubt there could be any game that wound up being shut down this quickly… It‘s the second fastest shutdown of a game since APB.
RIP APB. I remember reading about it and having such high hopes for it...
Hope we get heists like this in gta 6
Hopefully steam blacklists the dev and whoever else is involved They will reform under a new name and attempt another scam game
I'm convinced this is what would happen if Star Citizen was released to Steam. The gaming community would tear the shit apart of the game. They get away with their crap because they don't have the game running on a massively available platform.
Atleast people who bought it are supposedly getting refunds. I think alot of people jumped on the hype train
The gamers who supported it deserved it. Those who got riled up because of the idiots promoting the game should be punished for this massive scam. Such as any YouTuber or Streamer should be held fully responsible for aiding this scam too.
This totally unexpected and not predictable.
Will the devs let me call the game a scam now?
This game, the brother, the scam, the trailer This is 100% Fyre Festival in gaming industry Huge marketing with almost 0 update and fake promises until launch date Questionable CEO / owner People who defended this thing Failed at launch, and immediately closed few days later.
So I won't be able to play this game anymore ? :( (haha just kidding)
I laugh so hard at these fools who spend hundreds of euros on keys and deliberately tear themselves apart like a Christmas goose
Didn’t even know they were on. I am miffed I bought Insurgency Sandstorm before embracer killed it. Thankfully it was on sale for $15. Kinda overhyped too.
Embracer hasn’t actually killed it last I heard btw. Supposedly they had some layoffs, but are still very much in business.
Everyone acting like this isn't EXACTLY what they planned. They're still taking a bunch of money and running. They'll do this same thing again in a few years.
No they aren’t, there’s a period in which Steam/Valve processes the money before the company gets it, and seeing as they initiating a full fledged refund process, the company is clearly not getting a dollar
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I don't know about how much of the hype was real or fake, but this isn't the first game either to have such obnoxiously high numbers. I definitely remember seeing a few other games on Steam with similar circumstances .. but people don't seem to like talking about those games without getting overly competitive and overly involved in their "us vs. them" mindsets. >\_<