The Day Before Devs Tell The Tale Of Indecisive Leaders, Unpaid Work, And Crunch Culture

The Day Before saga continues well after the game’s closure as more information comes to light on the circumstances surrounding the zombie survival game’s epic failure. It’s a story of indecisive studio heads, unpaid work, extreme crunch culture, and just poor leadership on the part of the studio’s owners in the form of a new documentary from German video game websites Game Two and GameStar.

Anonymous sources shared accounts of a chaotic workplace where employees were subject to the ever-changing whims of Fntastic’s founders, Eduard and Aysen Gotovtsev. The Day Before apparently started out a small, stylized PUBG-ish survival game set in a wintry rural town that have been overrun by zombies. But, as the studio owners’ ambitions grew, so did the scale and scope of the game.

First, the team was asked to redo the visuals to make the game look more realistic, then the town to make it larger, before the Gotovstev brothers decided to scrap the original small-town concept and revamp everything. They reportedly also had to overhaul the character creator multiple times to make it more like GTA Online, then again to match Hogwarts Legacy, and again to match Baldur’s Gate 3. There was also one point where they had to dramatically change the city’s dark and gritty atmosphere to make it brighter and cheerier after the brothers played Spider-Man 2.

The teasers that came out in 2021 were allegedly a hodge podge of clips that were put together just to hype the game up. They were done in the style of popular post-apocalyptic game trailers, like The Division and The Last of Us, and were made specifically for the teaser and didn’t reflect actual gameplay.

After struggling to meet unrealistic deadlines and the constant barrage of changes, it ultimately came to the point where employees were being forced work excessive hours while being severely unpaid. Not that many of them had a choice, since most of the team consisted of young and inexperienced workers from various former USSR countries. One of the sources recounts that they had to beg for a few hours’ break just so they could eat and take a shower.

Employees were apparently also fined for subpar work as in the case of several employees who were forced to pay $1,930 due to poor quality of their voice recordings. The studio reportedly also had a policy that allowed employees to be fired on the spot, which further kept the team on their toes.

Sources also say that the game was never tested during development and that the brothers knew that the game was still largely unfinished but still decided to launch it anyway. They then disappeared just as the game launched and only showed up again to announce the studio’s closure on Microsoft Teams. Sources believe that they’re now working on a new mobile game at a new development studio.

There’s no denying that The Day Before will go down in history as one of the worst and most embarrassing video game launches of 2023 and not because of an alleged “hate campaign” by several bloggers.

You can learn more about the events that led to the game’s disastrous launch and the eventual shuttering of Fntastic in the full documentary below.