Source: https://twitter.com/FntasticHQ/status/1734265789237338453
Today, we announce the closure of Fntastic studio. Unfortunately, The Day Before has failed financially, and we lack the funds to continue. All income received is being used to pay off debts to our partners.
We invested all our efforts, resources, and man-hours into the development of The Day Before, which was our first huge game. We really wanted to release new patches to reveal the full potential of the game, but unfortunately, we don't have the funding to continue the work.
It's important to note that we didn't take any money from the public during the development of The Day Before; there were no pre-orders or crowdfunding campaigns. We worked tirelessly for five years, pouring our blood, sweat, and tears into the game.
At the moment, the future of The Day Before and Propnight is unknown, but the servers will remain operational.
We apologize if we didn't meet your expectations. We did everything within our power, but unfortunately, we miscalculated our capabilities. Creating games is an incredibly challenging endeavor.
We're grateful to everyone who supported us during these difficult years. It's been a fantastic journey over the past eight years:
2015: Opening of the studio
2017: Release of The Wild Eight
2018: Release of Dead Dozen
2018: Release of Radiant One 2021: Release of Propnight
2023: Release of The Day Before
Under promise, over deliver. The other way around only works if you're trying to capitalize on hype.
You do realize this was a scam?
With some different outcome scenarios for sure, but all of them included some dudes living on salaries payed by investors for a few years, then fucking off into the sunset with a variable amount of pocket change from the day 1 sales.
Is there a source for any of this? Speculation is one thing, but Ive seen people claiming this was made in both unity and unreal, and that some assets are bought, then all assets were bought, that they were only working for 2 years not 5, etc etc etc
Like I know it looks scammy, but whats the hard line people used to actually determine that?
And theres got to be some hard line, since the dayZ team mocked them for this. I dont expect another company to mock a fellow game maker shuttering unless there was harder evidence that they were scammers beyond internet guesswork.
Nah, just promote what you have. You don't have to 'over deliver', for some reason hiding away the great stuff you made. Just don't over hype.
This is not a story about a company failing because they hid product capabilities from their customers and were underappreciated because people didn't realize how good their product was. This is a story of a company over promising in their marketing and failing to deliver.
I stand by what I said in the context of this story, which is what we are discussing. if you don't know if you can deliver a feature don't put it out there that you're trying to make the feature. If customers know you're working on something and then you can't deliver they feel like they lost that thing. If they don't know that you're working on it and you pull it out of the hat before lunch or even in a post launch update everyone is excited because they feel like they got something extra for free. Obviously on launch you should explain the full capabilities of your product. But again that is not the context of this story.