The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 2021–2023
Fntastic hyped The Day Before into Steam's most wishlisted game — it collapsed in 4 days
Fntastic spent 3 years hyping an MMO that launched as a broken extraction shooter. Players dropped 90% in 4 days and the studio shut down.
Fntastic · Mytona Fntastic · 2023-12-11
What happened
Fntastic was a video game developer registered in Singapore, founded by brothers Eduard and Aysen Gotovtsev. The studio's first game, Propnight (2021), was a modest horror-prop-hunt title published by Mytona. But it was their second project that put them in the spotlight: The Day Before, an open-world MMO survival game announced on 29 January 2021.
The Day Before became one of the most wishlisted games on Steam by May 2022. The trailer promised a cinematic zombie apocalypse with exploration, PvP, and base-building — a 'breakthrough for the MMO survival genre.' Hype was enormous, driven by striking visuals and the promise of an MMO experience.
But problems emerged early. In June 2022, Fntastic confirmed it used unpaid 'volunteers' compensated only with participation certificates and game codes — sparking outrage. In January 2023, the Steam page was pulled due to a trademark dispute. The game was delayed multiple times: from June 2022 to March 2023, then to November 2023, and finally to an Early Access release on 7 December 2023.
When The Day Before finally launched, it was not an MMO at all but a broken extraction shooter with empty streets, no zombies, and bare-bones mechanics. IGN scored it 1/10. Reviews were 'overwhelmingly negative' on Steam. Player count dropped 75% in 2 days and 90% in 4 days. On 11 December 2023 — just 4 days after launch — Fntastic announced the studio's closure, stating the game 'failed financially.' The game was removed from sale; Steam refunded every purchaser.
Why it happened
- Fntastic spent years marketing a game that did not exist — the released product bore no resemblance to the trailers, and players who bought an MMO got an extraction shooter with almost no content.
- The volunteer-labour model meant the core team had no sustainable development capacity — when the launch failed, there was no team left to patch or iterate.
- Three years of hype created expectations that no realistic product could meet, and the gap between the trailer and the launch build was so vast that it destroyed all goodwill within hours.
- The trademark dispute and multiple delays eroded confidence, and the final rushed Early Access launch was a desperate attempt to monetise before the hype evaporated completely.
The lesson
Marketing a game that does not exist is not a strategy — it is a countdown. When trailer and product are different games, the days between launch and closure are the most expensive in a studio's life.
Aftermath
Fntastic removed the game from Steam and announced closure on 11 December 2023. The studio officially closed on 22 December 2023; servers shut on 22 January 2024. Steam refunded all purchasers. In September 2024, the founders attempted a comeback with 'Fntastic 2.0,' but a Kickstarter for Escape Factory was cancelled. The Day Before is now cited as a landmark case of overhyping a game that never existed.
Sources
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