I Feel Fntastic

The trailer showed third person over the shoulder scenes of characters navigating desolate landscapes, flavor text on newspapers indicating the deadly pandemic had spanned the world, and scenes of zombie like people bearing down on the characters, and a voiceover

called the game an open world, multiplayer survival game. The trailer claimed to feature gameplay footage as two characters scavenge for supplies, receive a radio invitation to join a survivor colony, and of course, fight off zombies and rogue player groups. It also showed off crafting, dynamic weather events, and more.

Other trailers would show off players seemingly teaming up to explore dynamic and interesting environments, including abandoned but still surprisingly very well lit shopping malls, or another trailer showed off what the outskirts of the city looked like, complete with woodlands and the occasional vehicle containing a little zombie surprise in it. The implication was that this was a massively multiplayer online survival horror game, and it was called The

Day Before, and gamers took notice. In fact, at one point, The Day Before ranked number one on Steam wish lists. That is, if you have a Steam account, the online video games store platform Steam, well, you can designate titles to be on your wish list, and then that helps you keep an eye on when those games come out, or if they go on sale or release new content, or you can just let folks know that if they want to get you something, well, the games on your

wish list are a decent option. So anticipation was running really high. It looked like The Day Before was going to bring together elements found in lots of other games, such as Seven Days to Die, Day, z GTA Online, Escape from Tarkov, and lots more. While lots of games had some elements of what appeared to already be in the day before. This looked like one of those rare combos that just matched a bunch of complimentary pieces together to make something new, kind of like when you get

peanut butter on your chocolate. Jump ahead a couple of years and then a few more delays. The game actually came out this year, just a couple of weeks ago. In fact, launched in early access through the Steam Store on December seventh, twenty twenty three, and four days later, Fantastic, the video game studio that made the day before, announced it was shutting down, and gamers were flooding Steam with

overwhelmingly negative reviews for the day before. The general consensus was that the game that Fantastic delivered was a far cry from what it had promised. So today I thought we'd talk a bit about where Fantastic came from, what has happened to it, and why gamers were so upset about the day before. So our story begins actually with

the predecessor to Fantastic. Before choosing that name, a group of developers who would go on to become Fantastic, at least some of them, formed a company called eight Points. They started their company in Siberia, Russia. According to a Kickstarter post they made more about that in a second. They were quote all from different studios where many of us had been working on cash games. We quickly realized our passion was not with casual titles, but for deeply

immersive experiences end quote. Now among the members of eight Points was lead developer Edward Gotoftsev, a name that is going to trip me up over and over again, and his brother Eisen will also be very important later on in this story. So for the first project of eight Points, the group decided on a quote plot driven survival co op game end quote, and they called it The Wild Eight.

The premise was that a group of eight survivors of a plane crash have to work together to survive in a harsh, cold environment, not that much different from the frozen tundra of Siberia, it would turn out. But plot twist, one of the survivors gets tagged to be a quote unquote psycho and is actively attempting to sabotage the team's efforts. So there's some hidden identity elements to this game as well.

So the kickstary campaign laid out some interesting features. You know, death was nearly certain as the environmental dangers ranged from freezing to death to being attacked by wolves and bears and maybe some less natural kind of critters. Characters could be revived, but with the psycho element in the game, there would always be the question of whether it might be better if you left a character to stay dead because maybe that character was the psycho. It was a

neat idea. The team was asking for fifty thousand dollars to complete the game, noting that all of the team had really sacrificed much of their own money to work on this project. This was in twenty fifteen, and they said they were aiming for a late twenty sixteen release. Backers actually on two hundred and fifty seven backers helped the team meet their goal, funding the kickstarter with fifty

nine thousand, six hundred and forty four dollars worth of pledges. Now, the team finished the game, but it took a little bit longer than what they wanted, just a little bit. The game actually launched an early access in February twenty seventeen, so it wasn't finished yet, but it was in early access. All was not well within eight points, however, there was some sort of internal disagreement among the group. I have

never been able to see what that actually was. I did a lot of digging to see if there was any more detail on this, but there wasn't. But ultimately there was a schism within eight Points, and so eight Points sold the Wild eight to a publisher called hype Train Digital, and at least some of the folks from eight Points, including Edward, would leave to form a new company that would become Fantastic. As for the Wild Eight,

that game would continue to go through development. It would launch in final form in twenty nineteen, and recently hype Train changed the name of the developer because it had been saying Fantastic, they changed it to eight point or eight Points, back to the original name of the developer group because of the fallout that is going on with the day before. So Edward names himself CEO of this new company. His brother Eisen comes on as a co founder.

Both of them reportedly put in around fifty thousand dollars of their own money into the company as capital. That's actually in Singapore dollars, I should add, because they based the company in Singapore at least in name, and a Singapore dollar is worth about seventy five cents American Now. According to former employees, the company didn't actually maintain a

physical office space. They did use a co op space as a sort of virtual office, but they didn't really maintain a real world brick and mortar office within Singapore. They did produce a few actual game titles. They made a first person shooter survival horror game called Dead Dozen Again, with a mechanic for players to turn against each other. One player would be playing a zombie like ghoul, and if you succeeded in killing another player, they would then become a ghoul, so it became kind of a last

man's standing sort of game. They made an adventure game called Radiant One that showed the studio's more artistic side, and they made an asymmetric multiplayer game called prop Night, in which one player takes on the role of a hunter killer type and all the other players attempt to hide within an environment by disguising themselves as common inanimate objects, and then when they are relatively safe, they tried to repair some stations to allow them to escape, kind of

a prop hunt slash Dead by Daylight mash up here. This s dollar game was made popular from a Gary's mod game that was being prop Hunt that came out several years earlier. In twenty twenty one, the year the studio released prop Night, they also unveiled a trailer for

their new game. The trailer referenced it as the open world, multiplayer survival game, and in this game, like I said, Appendem, had wiped out most of the world's populations, leaving cities empty of everyone but a few survivors and occasionally an infected person who's more or less a zombie. The trailer and others that would follow gave gamers the impression that it was set in a persistent online world, that it would bring together elements of massively multiplayer online games, survival,

horror games, crafting and base building games, et cetera. While there was some initial skepticism about whether or not this small and still relatively unknown studio could achieve this massive project, some folks were actually starting to get excited, and that was what was leading to more and more people adding this title onto their Steam wish lists. It became the number one wish listed game on the platform in October

twenty twenty one. Fantastic said the game would be out by June twenty first, two thousand two, some more trailers would come out proclaiming even more amazing features that the game would have, and then the studio kind of went quiet. And that was already starting to worry people, right, like the hype machine was an overdrive, and then things went to radio silence. When we come back, I'll talk about

what happened. Okay, So, as I mentioned before the break, we had Fantastic going to radio silence in the months leading up to what was supposed to be the release. But in May twenty twenty two, which was just a month before it was supposed to come out. Remember, originally the publication date was supposed to be June twenty first, twenty twenty two, May twenty twenty two, Fantastic issues a statement saying the game would be delayed by at least

eight months. The reason for the del according to the company, was that the team decided on using a different game engine. And yeah, that would definitely set you back a lot, asked the folks who worked on Duke Nukem Forever, another game that was in development for ages. So the move to a new engine struck more than a few people

as a questionable decision. It's not like you can just lift all your assets that you built for your starting game engine and then just port them to another one seamlessly. So this is where some folks were really starting to smell or aunt. Then we got another big reveal, one that I think would have totally made me rage out had I been following this story at the time. In June twenty twenty two, around the time that it was originally supposed to launch, word got out that Fantastic depends

at least in part on volunteer labor. So they had a distinction between full time volunteers whom they say they were paid, which to just sounds like an employee, and part time volunteers who were not people who would work without being paid for it. They might receive some other form of compensation. The company appeared to be targeting fans who had some developer skills to work with them in return for stuff like game codes for example. So yeah, you wouldn't need to buy a copy of the game.

You just have to work on developing the game for free, and then you get hooked up. Others might do work for exposure. This is where I remind you you cannot make a living from exposure, but you sure can die from it. Fantastic later said that volunteers weren't responsible for

coding or anything like that. Instead, they were doing other jobs like community management or working on localization, you know where you're trying to craft the game so that it is understandable and playable for people in different regions of the world. Meanwhile, more delays were around the corner. In January twenty twenty three, Fantastic announced that there was an issue. Apparently a calendar app also called the day before, objected to the video games title, and so the companies needed

to work out a solution. The release date was moved from March first, twenty twenty three, to November tenth. It would actually release into early access on December seventh. Now, the two brothers told IGN that the IP dispute was just a complication and that the studio had actually already decided to delay the game. So this seemed to contradict what they had just said, and the dispute apparently just

coincided with the company's plan to announce the delay. So again it appeared that there was some contradictions in communications to the public, and that was exacerbating concerns about the game at this point. Now there's another party involved in this that we have to talk about. There is a video game publisher called Mytona. Like Fantastics predecessor, Mytona is a company that's from Siberia, Russia. Also, coincidentally, it was co founded by brothers, different set of brothers. These are

twin brothers who co founded my Tona. Apparently my Tona had invested in development of the Day Before. This is not unusual, you know, publishers will invest money to help fund the creation or development of a game. But I bet these days that my Tona really wishes it hadn't done that. Anyway, the repeated delays were making gamers increasingly uneasy. Some had been referring to the Day Before as a scam for a few months at this point. That was

an accusation that the brothers denied. They also said that it wasn't just an asset flip. That's when you get a bunch of pre existing assets and then you just sort of cobbled together a game from them. The brothers were saying, no, that's not you don't understand how much work is being done on this title. That is not an accurate portrayal of what this is. An official statement from Fantastic said the game had been development for four years.

That's something that some people began to question because again, a lot of what the trailers were showing were things that look like assets that had been built for the Unreal Engine but hadn't existed for more than a year and a half or so. So there were questions about how could this game have been in development that long when the stuff that you're showing off hasn't even existed for four years. Now, at this stage, some gamers were taking a closer look at the stuff Fantastic put out

in trailers. They did point out similarities between the game and various asset packs that are up for purchase as part of the Unreal Engine. And I've talked a bit about asset packs. Let me explain what those are. This is stuff that has already been built on top of a game engine. Some developers have already created these assets that you can purchase and then incorporate into your own project.

And these aren't necessarily just visual assets. A lot of them are a lot of them are things that are you know, like objects or structures that have both the visual element and the geometry right, like a house with multiple floors, you have to program all that in well packs, you could purchase these things and incorporate them into your game and with some tweaking, make it all work. It's

not like it's plug and play. It's not that simple. Actually, it does require quite a bit of work to get an asset to work within the world of your game, so I don't want to dismiss that. But it also means that you don't have to do everything from scratch, right, You don't have to build every single element in your game by hand, because you can actually purchase stuff that's

already been made, and that can really help. However, some gamers also began to say that the Day Before was going beyond this and actually copying not just assets, but like existing game trailers in order to make their own trailers. They said that there were elements in game trailers for the Day Before that were directly lifting from a trailer for Grand Theft, Auto five or Call of Duty, Black

Ops Cold War. So those questions were starting to get more heated as well were really starting to look grim.

But on December seventh, twenty twenty three, Fantastic did release the day before in early access for thirty nine dollars and sold around two hundred thousand copies of it, with a statement saying that the studio hoped to emerge from early access within six to eight months to be a fully released game, whereupon it would cost forty nine dollars, so you know, buying an early access safety ten bucks. And it turns out none of that would be relevant.

It was all moot. It would never get the chance to go to full release because right away gamers began to film their gameplay sessions and compare their sessions against the trailers to show the disparity between the actual experience of playing the game versus the game that was being showed off in trailers for a couple of years at that point. They also complained that it was really hard to get a gaming session going because the servers could only hold around a one hundred people per server, and

they filled up really fast. I mean, you sold two hundred thousand copies super fast, so that requires a lot of servers for you to be able to actually facilitate gameplay. Then you had the really problematic issue where gamers found out that the day before was not an MMO survival horror game at all. Instead, it really belonged to a different kind of genre called an extraction shooter. So in an extraction shooter, gamers enter into an online map and they're only in it for a certain amount of time.

And while they're in this online map, they do their best to collect resources and to complete certain objectives, and then they need to make their way to an extraction point before their time runs out or they lose everything that they gained in that session. But there's no persistent world, right, It's not like you can leave a bit building or hide a stash into building and then come back three days later and get that stash. You can't do that.

There's also no elements of role playing games in the Day Before either, so gamers felt like they had been bamboozled. They said, this is not the same game that was being sold to us. Later, an anonymous former developer for Fantastic told Eurogamer that not only was The Day Before not an MMO, but that there had never been a plan to make it an MMO in the first place, that that was clearly beyond their abilities, and that it should never have been marketed as an MMO. The game

would be played on servers. Like I said, they could support like one hundred people, way too small for a classic MMO, and without role playing or in game plans or raids or anything like that, it just didn't meet the definition. The game that was being marketed was just

not the same one that was actually development. And this former dev also said that when team members would bring up concerns to the brothers and say, hey, you know, we're misleading people, this is not the same sort of game that we're actually making, they were often ignored, or worse,

they were moved off the project. The former developer also claimed that the brothers frequently changed their minds as to what should be in the game, and this contributed significantly to production delays because you would be working to add features in or take features out, or change direction, and obviously, without a unified approach to the direction of a game, you're not going to have a smooth development process. Okay, still got a little bit left to say about what

went on with the day before. Before I get to that, Let's take another quick break, all right. As I said, this former developer with Fantastic was saying that there never had been plans to make this game an MMO, something that really shouldn't come as a surprise based upon what was released, but it really shows the difference between the marketing and the development. Meanwhile, gamers were flooding Steam with

more negative reviews. The game wasn't really stable. Servers were filling up so quickly that players were often left waiting for ages for a session availability, only to feel disappointed once they actually were able to connect to a session. And this is part of what made the story so notable, because it went from being one of the most highly anticipated titles on Steam to one almost universally reviled by

the player base that had purchased the title. That made it really interesting, It was probably not so interesting to Fantastic, which attempted to go into damage control mode again. They made denials of being an asset flip. They said that they'd been working on the title for four years. They made kind of a half hearted apology for the marketing, saying that maybe the game hadn't been marketed properly. There should have been no maybe there, but these measures clearly

weren't working. They were not modifying the game community at all. Shockingly, four days after launching the game into early access, Fantastic announced that the company was shutting down because the game was not financially successful. Now, this also raised eyebrows because it had sold two hundred thousand copies in early access, and yes, a lot of people were already requesting refunds. But there'd been lots of games that had really rocky launches.

A Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven springs to mind. That game had a terrible launch. There were so many people pointing out flaws in the game, and yet the teams behind those games would rally and they would address the issue. And with Cyberpunk, it became an incredible turnaround. I mean, if you've heard about the DLC that came out earlier this year, that turned Cyberpunk from a joke where people just dismissed the game entirely, saying it's JANKI it turned

it into a Game of the Year contender, right. That is phenomenal. That's incredible dedication in your developer team, and it shows what can happen if you really do take the incoming criticisms to heart and try to address them. But Fantastic would never get that chance. The company focused instead on wiping out its online presence, including its YouTube channel, its founder's Twitter feed, like it's on website, pretty much

its entire online existence. Fantastic deleted Mytona. The publisher said it will honor refunds for all players who bought the game. If you buy a game on Steam, you can request a refund, but only if you've not played the game for too long. Two hours is the cutoff here. The idea is that if you play a game for like forty hours and then you ask for a refund, what you're doing is you're trying to scam the store and get your money back for a game that you have

thoroughly played. But if you bought a game, you booted it up and within an hour or so you realize you made a huge mistake, to quote arrested development, you can get your money back. But a lot of players were in that post two hour group, right, and that was largely because of those server issues. It's not like

they were actively playing the game. The game was running and they were trying to play it, but they were having trouble connecting to sessions, and so by the time they're able to request for a refund, they've already got more than two hours of quote unquote game time and

they would be left out in the cold. But my Tona appeared to say that this will not be the case, that they will honor all refunds by that time, by the time Fantastic was shutting down, nearly half of all the people who had bought the day before in early Access had already requested a refund. That's terrible. Now, some gamers accused the Brothers of trying to take the money and run, that the whole thing was a scam from top to bottom, that it was never anything more than that.

I don't have any hard evidence one way or the other, but here is my take. I doubt that this was an intentional scam. I just don't think it makes much sense to be an intentional scam. I think a lot of scummy stuff happened, right. I think there were a lot of really bad decisions, and those include unpaid labor being at the top. I think that's the worst decision,

But mismarketing the game is another clear one. So yes, there were definitely bad decisions that were being done, some shady stuff that was going on, But I don't think that the ultimate desire was to run a scam. For one thing, Steam doesn't pay developers in real time, right. If you go on Steam and you buy a copy of a game, it's not like Steam then cuts a check for the developer and sends it on right then

and there. In fact, most of the time, we're talking about a pretty significant delay, like a delay of a month or two between when Steam receives you know, revenue from purchases and when it sends that along to the developer. So when you've got a delay that's a month or two, then you know you can't You're not going to make any money by launching a game and then shutting down within less than a week. That's just not going to

work on that sort of time frame. So it's not like the Brothers took the money from those two hundred thousand initial sales and then said Cus suckers and ran off to Cabo or something. That's just not realistic. Instead, I think this was a case of a studio tackling a project that was just beyond their capability. They overpromised

and they underdelivered. They did appear to use pre build assets, right, but a lot of games do that, and it would be unrealistic to expect a small independent developer studio to build everything from the ground up in just a couple of years. That's just impossible if you look at some of the big Triple A titles out there, which obviously are built on a much larger scale. Granted, but these are companies that spend the better part of the decade

developing some of their big titles. So I don't think it would have been fair to expect a small studio to release an ambitious project like this in a year or two and not make use of pregenerating assets. I just don't think that was possible. I don't think that the assets were incorporated very well. I think that the gap between what was shown in trailers and what people could actually experience when they played the game was way

too big. I mean, you can watch videos of people doing side by side comparisons where the environments don't look nearly as good. The lighting is not at all impressive compared to the trailers. That's far less occupied by both zombies and player characters, so you can run through an entire region and not see anyone hardly the same sort of high tension kind of experience that the trailers were

giving off. So that certainly was an issue. And also I think, you know, the studio heads changing their minds over what needed to be in the game versus not in the game. That was a really huge blow to the company as well. And yeah, I think they were just kind of hoping they could do the fake it until you make it philosophy and that eventually things would shake out okay, But it didn't. So I think it was a project that was mired with terrible decisions. But

I don't think it was an intentional scam. If it in fact was an intentional scam, if that was the plan all along, and maybe the brothers just wanted to take my Tona's investment into the game and attempt to keep as much of that money as possible. Maybe that's the case. Maybe that was the case all along. Maybe they were just like, let's take the publisher money and run. But they didn't do that right away. They stuck around

and they actually put out a game. It's not like the game got canceled, which I would think would be more likely if you were trying to scam the publisher. Also, with both of those companies having their origins from Siberia, I would say that it'd be real risky to pull those kind of shenanigans on purpose. So I again I think the old adage of you should never attribute something to maliciousness when it could go to just incompetence. I'm more willing to believe in competence in this case coupled

with some shady business practices. But yeah, that's my take. I don't know anything for sure, but this was a really fascinating story that unfolded over the last couple of weeks, so I wanted to do an episode about it, and I hope that you found it interesting. I also hope you are all well, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.