Just 46 days after its disastrous launch in December 2023, The Day Before servers have officially shut down. The game launched in Early Access released on December 7, 2023, with the game being removed from Steam’s digital storefront just 4 days later on December 11.
In an official statement on X, Fntastic, the studio behind The Day Before, announced the closing of the game’s servers and the shuttering of the studio itself, with publisher Mytona making a statement declaring intent to refund purchasers of The Day Before.
The development and release of The Day Before can only be described as bizarre, with the game being initially announced in January 2021. The first announcement trailer went viral, garnering several million views and receiving praise for its realistic graphics and exciting gameplay. The game was described as looking like “a cross between The Last of Us and The Division” by IGN, with the developer describing it as an open-world, immersive MMO.
Initially, the release date was set for June 21, 2022 in a new trailer, but was pushed back to May 2023 just weeks before the reported release date, with Fntastic citing a switch to Unreal Engine 5 as the cause for the delay. A controversy involving Fntastic’s use of unpaid labor while creating The Day Before compounded with player dissatisfaction over the game’s delayed release.
Following this delay, The Day Before was delisted from Steam. Fntastic claimed that a trademark dispute forced the game off the platform, eventually stating that they had settled with the trademark holder at the cost of pushing the release date even further to November 2023.
Once near the top of Steam’s most Wishlisted games, The Day Before was plagued with a myriad of controversies leading up to its release, including accusations of plagiarizing trailer scenes from various other games like The Last of Us and Call of Duty and countless delays.
Following the game’s release in December 2023, fans realized that little to nothing of what was promised was actually included in the game, down to the genre of the game being a simple extraction shooter compared to the promise of an open world MMO. The Day Before quickly fell to Steam’s Worst Rated Games list, before being delisted from the platform just 4 days later.