The Day Before - A Scam To Remember

this video is brought to you by Ridge and their new lineup of carry-on suitcases as well as their refresh commuter backpack I took both of these with me on my recent trip to La for the game awards though the carry-on was smuggling something a little unconventional for carry-on luggage grab one for yourself and get 10% off all travel products by clicking the link below and using offer code skillup we'll stick around to the end of the video to learn more last week I was over at the game awards and I was thinking to myself I got to get home fast because I don't want to miss all the excitement of the day before at that moment it had just launched and was to put it mly crashing and burning just as we all predicted it would from the very first moment we saw this scammy reveal trailer I watched all this unfold and thought to myself well this is going to make for a good couple of weeks of news coverage isn't it little did I know that in the space of one news show this game would be released it would lose like its entire player base it would be refunded on mass it would be revealed as a top to bottom asset flip it would be delisted from Steam and it would result in the closure of the studio that made it this all happened in like four [ __ ] days I covered this scan from the very beginning and it reaches its climactic conclusion while I'm away overseas God damn you're fantastic you will pay for this right after you pay everyone their refunds all right so let's take it from the top because this story it needs to be told properly it's too funny to not tell it properly so that's what we're going to do okay here we [Music] go 2 years ago a trailer went up on IGN's YouTube channel from out of nowhere for a game called the day before remember that name by the way it'll become important later it was a very impressive trailer depicting a post-apocalyptic New York City in the wintertime Christmas was in the air and the bubles and Christmas lights lined the streets the plazas were slick with sleet rugged survivors carried sturdy backpacks as they scoured the streets of valuable loot if it looked a little familiar it might be because it was a direct [ __ ] rip off of ubisoft's The Division I never shared this story but I had developers from massive message me this trailer howling with laughter at how shamelessly this game was plagiarizing massive homework again keep the term plagiarism in mind it'll become important later damn this is starting to sound like an H bom Guy Video in more ways than one should I shape my head anyway the trailer was so impressive that attention immediately turned to the developer who were these talented upstarts able to emerge from nowhere and deliver one of the most impressive open world survival MMO trailers anyone has ever seen clearly this must be a well staffed wellar Source team full of veterans because that is the only way you can produce something this good on your first go around meet fantastic or at least the only two people that we know for a fact ever worked there these two guys are brothers they're the studios's founders and we assume game leads see they've got a dog in the shot a classic trick for any scammer we should have seen the warning signs it turns out that before this fantastic had released a number of half abandoned projects including most famously something called wild 8 a game they crowdfunded back in 2016 released into Early Access in 2017 and then ceased working on in 2018 after they sold the property to Hype train digital free of all that they released a tiny little isometric game in 2018 you can buy that on Steam for a buck fit they also released dead dozen a more ambitious Co-op horror game that was released in 2018 and delisted from Steam 18 months later fantastic would go on to release one actual video game in 2021 it was and is called prop night because believe it or not this game is still up and playable at least at the time of writing stuff is moving pretty quick at the moment it was a middling asymmetrical horror Style hideand-seek game it never broke mixed reviews on Steam but hey at least it's a playable video game that is very big for fantastic so with that pedigree behind them it was immediately clear to any Discerning video game enjoyer that there was no way in hell that this studio could possibly deliver a game like the one that fantastic showcased in this reveal trailer however fantastic weren't done getting us all hyped up because a little while later again through IGN they released a Gameplay trailer that if acurate would immediately position the day before as one of the best looking most polished and most featur rich games in the MMO survival genre the trailer had stunning visuals drivable Vehicles a whole vehicle repair mechanic tense combat encounters dense internal spaces and of course the promise of PVP this was quickly followed up by a release date trailer that had even more stuff in it even more impressive visuals a hub area Base building weapon crafting a saer for you and the boys to hang out best of all it was coming pretty soon as the release date was set for June 1st 2022 now even though all of this was clearly [ __ ] the day before went on to become the most wishlisted game on all of steam that is how much pull the survival MMO Zombie thing has audiences are so hungry for it that all you need to do is wave a completely fake and flashy trailer in front of them and they'll add it to their wish list again we'll come back to this later now what happens here is not a lot we get another trailer in 2021 again through IGN this time showcasing more gameplay that looks identical to the division but definitely hints at the promise of drivable tanks that's cool can't wait to experience that never after that fantastic Go Radio silent for a few months to the point where we're like just a month from the release and there's been no new trailers no beta test no actual gameplay shown nothing and then a month before the promised release date fantastic emerges with an announcement that is truly shocking and by truly shocking I mean not remotely shocking in the slightest [Music] in May fantastic announced that the day before was coping a delay and not a small one either instead of releasing in June as originally promised it would now arrive in March 2023 oh my God what the hell knock me over with a feather no one could have seen this coming except for anyone paying attention the delay wasn't the surprising part though the surprising part was this quote feeling and understanding the great responsibility that we face with enormous gratitude in our hearts we are pleased to announce the day before is switching to the new Unreal Engine 5 technology the transition to a more advanced and adapted open world engine will make the gameplay of the day before even more fantastic end quote so I am not a game developer I don't know [ __ ] but I do know enough to know that announcing a change to your engine when you are 1 month from your originally communicated release date is fishy as [ __ ] I asked Game Dev Twitter if it would be possible to Port a game from unreel engine 4 to 5 in the span of around 10 months and what came back from a few people including one Philip Greg lead game designer at idos Montreal was that it would be possible depending on how much fantastic had modified their Unreal Engine 4 instance quote if they were using nothing more than the Bas u4 it's doable but I highly doubt that end quote Oh man little did we know we'll come back to the asset flipping later so right now we're at May 2022 and again we enter a period of radio silence but at this point everyone's suspicious and everyone's digging deep to see if they can figure out whether or not this game is real because the quality of these trailers combined with the history of this developer and the last minute delay and a last minute jump to Unreal Engine 5 it's very clear that something fishy is going on enter wellplay do.com an Australian publication that was poking around on Fantastic's website when they were doing so they noticed an allnew volunteers page it describes Fantastic's overall philosophy which is that apparently everyone who works for them is a volunteer there are two types of volunteers the first one is a full-time volunteer who gets paid money so the exact opposite of what the term volunteer means okay the other is a part-time volunteer who is compensated with non-monetary rewards no information is provided on what those rewards might be I expect firm pats on the back and thank you hands emojis so this was all very concerning you've essentially got one of the most impressive looking MMO survival games ever revealed and it's being made by volunteers setting aside the ethical concerns about framing labor that way how can you expect a team of volunteers to make something better than what Ubisoft made with the division when Ubisoft had hundreds of experienced full-time staff working for over 6 years to deliver that video game when this story broke fantastic responded to wellplay with this quote the values of our company are about dedication willingness to help to deliver great products and in doing so being kind and open-minded during the short history of our company there have been many people who approached us and wanted to help in different ways it doesn't relate to code writing or development itself but other important things such as moderation localization or simply rooting for us and cheering us up end quote okay so first of all localization is absolutely part of development as is Community Management as for rooting for you and cheering you up what the [ __ ] are you talking about are you telling me you had volunteers who just wanted to hang around and blow smoke up your ass while you churn out more fake trailers okay boys whatever you say so it's really important to note at this point is that fantastic were not collecting any pre-order dollars for this game they were pumping out an endless Cavalcade of fake trailers but to this point they had not put their hand out to ask for any dollars and I noted that back then and it seemed strange to me because this had all the makings of something that should have been like a Kickstarter scam where a flashy trailer sets people up for a big donations Drive followed by 12 months of silence and then an ooo whoopsy tweet money's gone game's canceled see you never so back then I was thinking to myself what's the deal here like what's really going on it just didn't make sense but it would soon thanks to a random conversation I had with a journalist friend of mine who was speaking to Fantastic behind the scenes about the day before only fantastic weren't really interested in talking about the day before in fact they weren't interested in talking about games at all so before we get to this next part let me ask you this have you guys heard of Microsoft teams this journalist friend of mine was in communication with fantastic for a while trying to get them to answer some some basic [ __ ] questions like is your game real can you please prove that it's real are you even real fantastic we're stringing this person along for a long time eventually fantastic did respond but not at all how you'd expect instead they said that they would answer questions about the day before but only if this journalist agreed to also ask questions about something called the continent app what is the continent app you ask well here's where things get really interesting the continent app is an online collaboration tool developed by fantastic all of this has been scrubbed from the internet now but using the way back machine you can see that back in 2018 they secured a domain for continent app.com and they put up a basic now defunct website they would do nothing with that until the 3rd of January this year where they would do a major update the website boldly stated we decare war on officers and they proceeded to show something that was essentially just Microsoft teams from wish just a few days after that website update fantastic released a trailer that they positioned as being about the day before or at least about the making of it this trailer was titled life at fantastic and it's essentially one big infomercial for the continent app regularly referencing it and showing shots of it when they didn't need to do that so you can see what's going on here fantastic we're asking journalists to ask questions about the continent app they did a website refresh they push out an infomercial trailer and fantastic announced that they plan to sell the continent app as an Enterprise product for me this was the moment when it all started to make sense there were theories that fantastic were using the day before to promote their other game prop night but I never bought into that because it just seemed like too small a play but an Enterprise level productivity app sold at a time when we'd all reoriented to work from home I could definitely see the case for the day before being a bait and switch come see our flashy fake trailers stay for the dollar store Microsoft teams but that is just a theory again never mind what is true is that whatever plans fantastic had for the continent app or the day before those plans were about to get blown the hell up in a pretty hilarious way in January of 2023 the life at Fantastic trailer had really pissed people off fantastic had promised that that would be the trailer to show actual gameplay and it did not so people began pressuring fantastic for what was promised fantastic were a little quiet at first but eventually they agreed to release some gameplay and they did so in a really weird Post in their Discord through the lead mod that made it sound like they were doing us a favor by releasing gaml for their game that was releasing in 6 weeks we all waited patiently but on January 25th out of nowhere the day before the most wishlisted game on Steam was delisted from Steam now the initial reaction to this was okay boys here's the rug pole we've all been waiting for and to be fair that rug pool would come but not for a while yet in response to this fantastic initially said on their Discord that the issue was the result of a steam error and that the game would be back up shortly soon after that though they released an official statement that revealed that a private individual had issued a copyright infringement notice through Steam because they apparently had the rights to the name the day before and they didn't want fantastic to release their game under the same name the rights holder was someone based in Korea and they did actually have a calendar app called the day before four so yeah it seemed like for once what fantastic was saying was actually true but like imagine announcing your ambitious MMO Survival game without first checking if the name was okay to use seems like a bit of an oversight right so this was very odd but it was downright scandalous when fantastic announced that due to this copyright claim they would no longer show us the promised gameplay I mean why not just take the name off the game play and show us the gameplay if your game is real then just [ __ ] show it to us doesn't matter what the name is at that point of this copyright claim they also said quote as a result we have made the difficult decision to postpone the launch to November 10th 2023 end quote so that's an 8mon delay over a copyright claim when they had no idea at that point how long it would take to sort out that claim days later when speaking to IGN fantastic said that they had already plan to delay the game before the copyright claim happened then why the [ __ ] did you say the delay was as a result the copyright claim so at this point I'm 1,000% certain that this game is a scam I was pretty certain before but after this I was like no man this is definitely some serious snake all [ __ ] right here I was kind of running point on it on Twitter that day and I spent a bit of time in the official Discord and it was there that the lead mod who was the person who initially announced the gameplay reveal on Fantastic's behalf they said that they'd never actually seen any of the gameplay themselves and at that point they were not sure that the game was actually real a week later the only thing we got to put our minds at ease the continent app website received a handsome update announcing all new features like voice chat 1 month later on March 14th the continent app website will be taken down its Twitter handle decommissioned and fantastic would never speak of it again in January it was their main pitch in February they were making the website look even more pretty and in March it was dead what happened to the continent app the truth is I don't know know perhaps someone looked at this app and thought you know what this is a dumb idea we should probably focus on making the video game we've got 10 months to Port our game from Unreal Engine 4 to 5 and it's the most wishlisted game on Steam so let's maybe do that to me continent always seem like this clever Plan B like this team knew that they could never make the game that they promised but they' already made continent and it worked allegedly so you may as well ride the day before locomotive for as long as you can before it eventually barrels off a cliff all the while trying to Spook this productivity software on the side so for fantastic to wholesale abandon that plan B meant that they were going all in on the day before but there was still that little problem of them not having released any actual gameplay in February of 2023 fantastic was under a lot of pressure because everyone was calling this game a scam to the point where fantastic took an interview with IGN where they rebutted the scam claims and insisted that they were like a real boy quote the storm will calm down eventually and time will put everything in its place when the game comes out people will finally see the truth end quote oh buddy you were right about that one to help put people's minds at ease fantastic did something that they had promised to do nearly a year earlier release actual gameplay of their video game let's take a look at what was shown okay I'm going to stop you right there remember how I said that the word plagiarism would become important later well welcome to later the day before was already a Shameless ripoff of the division setting the location the time of the year the militaristic fortifications everywhere the character and clothing designs it was a straight up dragon drop I mean look at this key art on the left is the division and on the right is the day before bro but this would not be the only time where fantastic would drink deep from the plagiarism well this Gameplay trailer released in February was so Brazen they lifted shots from a Call of Duty Black Ops C War trailer as you can see this is not riffing on a theme this is just shot for shot plagiarism later on they'd go to release another trailer showing a Lambo racing through the streets pretty iconic huh just a shame that Will Smith did it years before in the movie I Am Legend more recently just last month in fact fantastic put out a trailer that wasn't necessarily plagiarism but it was definitely copying Rockstar's homework as this compilation from YouTuber randomly highlights the weapons which can be modified are made with maximum realism to ensure that combat remains deep and engaging at all times make combat deep and engaging at all times each weapon boasts unique characteristics as well as realistic reload and recoil mechanics each weapon has unique characteristics with realistic reload and recoil so clearly whoever fantastic are paying to do their trailers this person's cutting a few corners and hoping that we won't notice and their plan would have worked too if if they hadn't played trce literally some of the most successful and widely played video games of all time it's like dude if you're going to steal someone's work at least shoot for a smaller Target anyway that's the plagiarism tangent out the way now where were we oh yeah that's right the game [Applause] play oh what what sorry I sorry I I fell asleep watching the exciting gameplay reveal for the day before because nothing is [ __ ] happening and basically nothing happens during this entire 10-minute trailer looking back I have to applaud fantastic for this because it was actually a fairly accurate look at what the final game would be like there's a lot of running around big empty and environments with nothing going on a lot of slowly painfully looting stuff out of containers a very very low density of zombies with no enemy variety at all and a smattering of PVP if you're lucky the other thing that was honest about this trailer was how visually downgraded it was I mean Austin let's do the comparison thing uh there you have it kind of spure itself doesn't it it is ironically another way in which the day before plagiarized the division a totally faked reveal trailer followed by some actual game play that looked almost nothing like it I'm allowed to make that joke by the way cuz you know me and the division we go way back anyway the reception to this trailer was exactly what you'd guessed it might be dislikes Reddit threads condemnation The Jig was up and coupled with the delisting of the game from Steam surely that meant the effective end of the day before right right at this point Fantastics settle in for their legal battle over the trademark dispute the Calendar app was holding fast to their claim and the matter did actually go to court with fantastic emerging Victorious on the grounds that it's unlikely anyone would confuse a calendar app with a video game but that didn't stop Monster energy from sending a ceas and assist to Ubisoft for trying to call one of their game's Gods and Monsters so I clearly have no idea how the world of trademark law Works while all of this was going on fantastic was still cranking the hype handle as fast as they could despite the game still being delisted they announced an all new feature jobs and these weren't classes by the way these were like actual jobs like you could apparently be a manual laborer and like lift things I guess you could also be a musician okay not exactly sure how that would work in a zombie apocalypse MMO Survival game but it doesn't matter because fantastic had no intention of delivering on that promise but it got them some good headlines so mission accomplished in April fantastic announced that they would be holding a beta okay now we are getting somewhere real games have betas so clearly the day before must be a real game right oh what's that the beta is only available internally to volunteers of fantastic then it's not a beta then is it it's an internal test you [ __ ] chuckle Fox fast forward a little bit and the November first release date was quickly approaching fantastic had won their legal battle and the day before it was relisted on Steam and to celebrate fantastic delayed the game again but that wasn't all the delay pushed the game Back to December 7th which it turns out would become the actual release date of the game but fantastic also announced that the game would no longer be a full 1.0 release and would instead be early access now Early Access is a perfect fit for fantastic because it allows them to take your money without the game being finished or functional so really this was a slam dunk decision for them there couldn't have been a clearer red flag for the rest of us but fantastic were about to strike gold and they knew it they did not have anything close to what was promised in those reveal trailers that didn't matter because under the Early Access label they could just say that all of that was coming later and they'd be totally in the clear but still fantastic knew that comparisons would be made between what was initially revealed versus what would actually ship on December 7th luckily fantastic had a foolproof way to get around this on December 6th the day before the day before was meant to release fantastic scrubbed their YouTube channel of all of their old promotional trailers damn you fantastic you slide dog with those trailers deleted from your YouTube channel it'll be impossible for us to make comparison videos now that is how the internet works videos only live in one place and now all record of your prior lying has been expunged from the int tubes well played boys well played so that move was ridiculous but also very audacious but what made it even better was that on the same day that they did that they posted up on Twitter this emotionally manipulative jpeg being like to everyone who didn't believe in us we made this game for you too to our supporters thank you for protecting us from Injustice and fakes okay they also said this and this is so crazy quote please don't accuse us of scamming that's not true we didn't take a penny from anyone please don't accuse us of asset flip that's not true also our team worked day and night for 5 years to make our Dream game a reality end quote we will come back did that so the day prior to release fantastic are covering up evidence while also asserting that the game is neither a scam nor an asset flip on December 7th 10:00 a.m. PST fantastic turned on the servers allowing us to see for ourselves what this game really was and it went spectacularly this may be the worst game I have ever played the day before is a scary example of what's now possible with modern game engines and overflowing asset the is easily one of the worst games I ever played just a scam game B now it is a boring and everything else about this game is shallow it's lacking this game in my opinion is in fact a scam and what is perhaps the most damning indictment on all of us for this whole Saga the day before debuted with an extremely impressive 38,000 current players on Steam to put that in context RoboCop Rogue City a game based on an established IP with very solid pre-release reviews hit a peak of roughly 5,000 concurrent players Lords of the Fallen was an ambitious but flawed soulslike with a buttload of marketing spend behind it and it peaked at 32,000 concurrence meanwhile Immortals of AUM which had its problems but it was a proper video game published by EA with plenty of marketing span behind it flopped hard achieving a peak of just 482 concurrent players and then over here we've got the day before the video game manifestation of the term red flag and it was riding high at nearly 40,000 current players on its launch date you want to know why we keep getting fake trailers it's because they work still that play count was not long for this world as it took everyone about 4 and 1/2 seconds to realize that every single doubt we've ever held about this game was well founded and that we were now in the eye of the storm of one of Gaming's greatest scams obviously there were server issues many people simply couldn't log into the game and when they did server latency was so bad that it would take a second for bullets to register look at this I can't emphasize enough how bad the shooting feels in this game it's slow it feels desynchronized it's it's really unbelievable like look at this stuff look at this is this is how shooting looks like and feels in this game there was also a plethora of gamebreaking bugs the most hilarious being this weird giant head thing that kept happening for inexplicable reasons there was also an issue with falling through geometry and because fantastic a hack and fraudsters they didn't include an unstuck command if you fell through the world and logged out you'd still be falling when you logged back in meaning that your character was effectively soft lock and the only way to continue playing was to start a new character more daming than all the technical issues though was the realization that this game wasn't even the same [ __ ] genre as what had been promised all along from the very moment the day before was revealed it was positioned as an open world survival MMO now obviously that's a broad term but it does come with some expectations about scale about structure the term MMO in particular speaks to the idea of persistence you can obviously get into the weeds and argue about the terminology but generally speaking when someone says open world survival MMO they mean something other than what this actually is so what is this well it turns out the day before is nothing more than a very Half Baked extraction shooter there is a base of operations in its own instance it's not connected to the rest of the world there you can take on bounties which just involve looting rubbish and then bringing it back home each new run begins in a random location in the city you're just kind of dropped there after the loading screen like every other extraction shooter if you die you lose everything you have on you and if you haven't saved up some backup gear and currency back at base then your next run involves you running around unarmed hoping to get a weapon drop before someone else finds you spoiler alert you will often run around looting stuff for upwards of 30 minutes before you're lucky enough to get a weapon drop and then something like this will happen so the claim that this was an open world survival MMO was just a total [ __ ] lie to the point where when the game went live fantastic went into steam's back end and removed the MMO tag from The Game's listing as well as the tag open world because it wasn't an MMO and it wasn't an open world by any stretch of the imagination but it also really wasn't a game like it had maps and guns and you could shoot zombies and other players sure but that was it I guess this where I should talk about my time playing it so I'm not going to lie to you guys I couldn't play any more than a few hours of this because it was just too threadbear and too boring I went through the charactered crater which is whatever there was some like class options that were so poorly explained that you just knew that any of the promised stat increases did absolutely nothing so I didn't worry too much about that when I got in I was forced to run around this boring base of operations talking to these boring NPC each of them explained their boring purpose before sending me on my way there was no characterization no story line no main quest line they handed me a data pad thing and we're like best of luck before that though they sent me to my little plot of land where I could do the whole Base building thing now this was a really hyped up feature in the trailers because people love Base building right but it turns out that all this is is just cosmetic money sync stuff with no utility whatsoever like you can build a place to rest your head but you can't actually rest your head there this space serves no function or utility and it isn't at all connected to the other game systems it's just a place to dump your credits on inanimate [ __ ] that serve no function whatsoever okay so what about the rest of the game the the extracting part well like I said you accept randomly generated missions from your data pad and it's like find me three pieces of wire and you're like all right sweet let's go get us some wire and then you walk out of the base of operations door by selecting new Fortune city as your destination you are randomly dropped on the map and then you get to experience for yourself how unbelievably clunky and rubbish it feels to play this game character Locomotion is awful you can Sprint endlessly because your stamina bar allows you to do that but you can only jump like three times before you run out of breath you can't mantle up any Ledges so if anything is higher than about a foot you just can't get up it most of the game is focused on looting containers but there's no consistency about which containers can be looted versus which ones can't so you walk up to one suitcase and you can loot it and then you walk over to an identical suitcase and that one's not lootable and don't even get me started on the actual looting mechanic it is so annoying and finicky to get your character into just the right spot where they can actually initiate the loot animation and half the time you have to like dry hump each container to find The Sweet Spot distance to be able oh it's so annoying to this point you may have noticed that I haven't shot any zombies yet or even seen any and there's a reason for that there's basically none on the map the day before follows the redfall school of mob density design allowing you to explore huge spans of the city without ever seeing any enemies when you do see them they're just a total Joke Man they pose absolutely no thread they run directly at you and you can just shoot them slowly to trigger this like raw animation that they do and they die in like four or five bullets or whatever contrary to the hordes of zombies that we see in the trailers I never saw more than I think three of them in one space at a time and in my couple of hours of playtime I think I saw maybe 10 of them total I did see other players though and I eventually died to one this cost me all of my gear and my currency and when I loaded up back to the base I had nothing on me apparently you're supposed to get some welfare allowing you to purchase at least a new handgun and some bullets but that must have been bugged because I got nothing when I woke up and that means that I had to head out into the world with nothing but my dick in my hands hoping that I would eventually get a weapon to drop I assumed that the game would kind of do me a solid and that it would quickly you know spawn a weapon into one of the lootable caches but I would go upwards of 30 minutes sometimes running around unarmed trying to find anything that I could shoot and yeah when I eventually did I'd still die because I had no armor no healing consumables no anything and you might say well why don't you just melee instead that is an excellent suggestion one that had fantastic survived as a studio they might have added to their jurab board it's impossible to believe it but this zombie apocalypse extraction shooter launched without any melee function so if you have no bullets in your gun there's literally nothing you can do when asked if there were plans to add it to the game one of the developers responded on Discord quote we're considering it end quote might have made sense to consider that one before launch my dude look I could go on describing all the ways that this is awful but I mean you get it and everyone else got it really fast and I mean like within 2 hours fast and that window is important because that's the amount of time that valve will let you play a game before you're no longer allowed to refund it when it came to the day before though valve were more than willing to make an exception on day one the cracks were starting to show but by day two those cracks were like giant Grand Canyon siiz chasms the game Lost approximately 60% of its play base overnight and a further 20% the day after that so what was happening well predictably everyone was getting a refund an unconfirmed internal leak revealed the day before sold some 200,000 units but that 91,000 of those had been refunded a truly staggering refund ratio that's got to be some sort of record we got to get Guinness on the phone to confirm this one steam users were also exactly what you'd expect they might be overwhelmingly negative immediately 81% of players is clicking the dislike button on this bad boy this made the day before one of the lowest rated games in the history of steam putting it alongside the likes of OverWatch 2 which really goes to show you the different ways that people like to use the user review function because while OverWatch 2 certainly has it its problems it ain't no day before so with everyone having refunded the game these people had a lot of time on their hands and some of them set their minds to the task of breaking open the game files to see what they could find remember earlier how the brothers fantastic were all like don't call us an asset flip we work for 5 years on this now this probably isn't going to be particularly surprising at this point of the story but it turns out that that's not true either a number of steam users and redditors began compiling all of the store boo assets utilized in the day before and it is a very extensive list dozens and dozens of assets all of them implemented with only the most minor of changes there's also accusations that the city map itself is a storebox bundle on the Unreal Engine store if this is the map we're playing on one interesting thing to note about it is that this pack was released in April of 2021 3 months after the game's initial reveal trailer went live that would make it very difficult to believe that the team worked on this game for a full 5 years as claimed but at this point no one really believes that anyway and just to be clear there's absolutely nothing wrong with using storebox that lets you make a better game then absolutely go for it the problem is when you spend 3 years straight up lying to people about what a game is or will be only to then release what is essentially a storeo assets compilation at that point yeah obviously people are going to wonder how you've been spending the preceding 3 years of game def time so right now we're up to day three we've now seen that the game isn't even the same genre as what was promised it's a bug Rd mess it's lost 80% of its player base and it's pretty clear this whole thing was thrown together in a few months using a bunch of storeboughtslime on act three the ACT I like to call on December 12th 4 days after release fantastic took to Twitter with a JPEG now usually at this point in a botch release the jpeg is of the oooo whoopsy variety we're sorry that we didn't meet players expectations we set a very high bar internally and we didn't reach that we're committed to the long-term success of the game yada yada yada you know the drill we've seen it a million times before to their credit fantastic weren't going to go quite into that good night instead they' go out in a spectacular ball of flame so bright that we're going to be telling our grandkids about it quote today we announced the closure of fantastic 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 of 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 End quotes they go want to reiterate that they never took any money during development which is true but it also doesn't excuse you just straight up lying for 3 years regardless it was a stunning development I mean even with the refunds these guys had just had a cash injection of around $3 million after steam's cut and at that moment they decide that they don't have the funds to continue this Rinky Dink asset flip of a game really cost them so much that that sort of cash injection wouldn't be enough to float them at least a few more months it was a very suspicious claim but it got even more suspicious days later when one aloicious low tried to visit Fantastic's office in Singapore because apparently they're a Singaporean developer when low arrived at the listed address he expected to find Fantastic's office full of despondent looking stuff instead he found a co-op working space with no fantastic staff at all Lo spoke to the office manager there and this manager told them that there had never been any fantastic staff there and that fantastic simply used the space's address as a Virtual Office Space fantastic also had another address listed in Singapore and when low visited that office he found that they were never there either and it instead belonged to a team of management Consultants so what likely happened here is that fantastic who are based in Russia Incorporated themselves in Singapore to sidestep any of the sanctions currently being imposed but in so doing fantastic had to make Financial filings to the Singaporean government low got hold of those it turns out that fantastic filed $3.4 million in Revenue in 20122 and the two brothers paid themselves a handsome salary of around $200,000 they also build a travel expense of over $38,000 in a single year which is like insanity that's roughly $25,000 a month on travel but coming back to that $3.4 million in Revenue fantastic declared a profit of nearly $1 million in 2022 after paying out all of those salary and travel costs on their balance sheet they list $1.4 million in cash just sitting in their account combined that with the roughly $3 million brought in from the launch of the game plus any additional funding that came from the publisher myona and it becomes very difficult to believe that this company could suddenly find itself insolvent inside of Just 4 days either way from this point onwards things moved pretty quickly valve took the extraordinarily rare step of delisting the game from their storefront so you could see it but you could no longer purchase it the brothers fantastic set about scrubbing any record of themselves or their scam from the internet just after this announcement went live they deleted their Twitter handles their LinkedIn profiles and they also fully scrubbed their YouTube channel deleting every single video these guys really do not understand how the internet works and it is adorable soon after this publisher mytona would put up their own jpeg this time promising to offer refunds to any players that request Ted okay that's cool appreciate that but according to Fantastic myona had been reviewing and approving the day before at various project Milestones they also ran point on the legal battle over the trademark dispute and as publisher they would have led the marketing effort on this namely the creation of all of those fake trailers myona is absolutely as culpable for this as is fantastic perhaps even more so because fantastic couldn't have got as far as they did without a publisher to enable them the offer of refunds is welcome but many people will not refund this game because they aren't terminally online and won't know to do it they'll just be stuck with their purchase and myona will keep their money My Hope Is that valve initiates an automatic refund process for all purchases but I've never seen them do that before and I wouldn't expect them to start now so that's all the substance now let's have a little fun and bring this [Music] [Applause] home when it was clear what had gone down it was time to start dancing on the corpse of this game Game Day Z an actual open world MMO survival zombie game put up their own white JPEG that read as follows quote today we want to primarily celebrate for no reason at all the remarkable 10year anniversary of DayZ end quote they thank everyone for all their support before going on to list all of their prior updates in formatting that was a little too familiar they'd go on to sign it Dead game with the font strike through not exactly subtle but still good for a laugh a few days later they were back this time partnering with another Survival game called Icarus and they were hosting a sale that they titled the day after 33% off both games on Steam absolutely love to see it tip of the hat to the marketing department on that one because the day before it was so bad basically no one bothered to take the time to review it the only major Outlet to do so was IGN they scored the game A 1 out of 10 the first time in more than a decade that they scored a game that low by the way they said of it quote the day before is easily one of the worst games I've ever played to the point where I'm afraid to continue running it on my PC and if you didn't manage to try it you can count yourself as one of the lucky ones end quote the dunks continued across all of social media and really culminated In This Moment fantastic tweeted out that they were working to deliver refunds through mytona and someone responded being like this is terrible you guys are an absolute disgrace to the video games industry Etc Fantastic's actual official Twitter account responded with this quote this was our first big experience [ __ ] happens end quote [ __ ] happens yes yes it certainly does I wish I could say that there was some lesson to be learned in all of this but the truth is there isn't while I can't recall a bait and switch as Brazen and as Shameless as this I think we've all felt the overall Contours of this many times before and will'll doubtless feel them again in future fake trailers work hype works even when there's a critical mass of people calling something a scam and warning people about it there's still going to be enough people willing to stick their fingers in their ears and hand over their cash I mean think about how many actual proper video games Flo this year that deserve to do better that Warhammer age of Sigma RTS massively undersold Immortals of Aven was far from perfect but it flopped so badly that the studio had to initiate massive layoffs there's unconfirmed reports that Alan way 2 is selling poorly and that's like Game of the Year runner up Shadow gamber was a fantastic title that sold so poorly that it resulted in in the closure of the studio and here you've got a game that was an obvious scam right from the jump and it manages to sell through 200,000 units on day one it had a successful launch on the back of nothing but fake trailers and lies and while I would like to think this would give us pause I suspect it's really only going to serve as encouragement for the next unscrupulous outfit that comes along hoping to recreate Fantastic's business model only next time they'll have the sense to ask for cash up front as for what comes next who can say clear C the brothers fantastic are done as is their Studio that means that the service for the day before will come down eventually and if prop KN is to continue it'll need to be managed by another Studio but I can't imagine anyone wanting to inherit that poison chalice there will be refunds issued and Reckoning back at my Tona HQ but for the rest of us the best we can take away from all of this is the story of having lived it IGN said that if you didn't experience this for yourself then you're one of the lucky ones but I disagree we were witness to gaming history in this moment and like cyber Punk at launch on last gen consoles and no man's sky at launch or believing anything Peter Mullen new has ever said we will wear these scars proudly and tell these stories for years to come that is why I made this video so we will never forget all of the [ __ ] and we can always look back and laugh at how these clowns ever thought they might get away with it thank you very much for watching Remember to like the video and I'll see you next [Music] time all righty new products from this video sponsor Ridge this is always exciting because whatever Ridge put out they nail their Ridge wallet is what made them famous a Cutting Edge glow up for your wallet that keeps your cards safe both physically and from RFID scams it comes in a range of styles and materials and just looks fantastic no matter what you pick been using this for years now and I could never go back to a traditional leather wallet they also do their key case which organizes your keys like their wallets do your cards Sleek simple and so much more comfortable than using a big messy clump of keys stabbed into your thigh so like I said anything Ridge do they crush it and this is their all new thing the ridge carry-on it comes in a range of colors as most Ridge products do making it easy to mix and match with your backpack your wallet or your key case or whatever it's weatherproof to the point where you can actually hose this thing down while you've got stuff in it and that'll all stay dry it's super strong while being super light it's got a 30% thicker shell than standard carryon and you can really feel that strength and density but you definitely do not feel the weight the wheels are oversized and spin in a full 360 making it very easy to maneuver and the handle is awesome it's big it's easy to grip it's textur so it won't slip and it Glides so smoothly when you engage that mechanism it even has a little hidden compartment thing for stashing a GPS tracker which is very handy so your average person would use this thing for its intended purpose luggage for clothes and whatever but not your boy because I am weird and I actually use this to transport a PC it's a microatx form factor that I'll talk about very soon but I brought it with me because I was like you know what why not this is the PC setup in my hotel room and that is what I worked on all week like I said I will talk more about that one soon but yeah the carry-on is fantastic as is the newly refreshed commuter backpack this is an all-tim for Ridge I used their previous commuter backpack as my daily driver and now this one is just better with reconfigured storage meaning I can organize things even easier than before so it's really great stuff like I said I personally vouch for it I just took it with me to La it was awesome but if you have your doubts then worry not because Ridge are so confident in their product that they are offering a 99-day risk-free trial you can try this stuff if you don't like it you can get a full full refund within 99 days and if you do choose to keep it it has a lifetime warranty name for me how many luggage manufacturers are offering a lifetime warranty these days I'll tell you not many but Ridge are because they believe in their product and the 80,000 FST star 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Channel: Skill Up

Views: 1,860,954

Keywords: skill up, skill, up, gameplay, games, guide, the day before, the day before gameplay, the day before game, the day before scam, the day before trailer, the day before news, the day before review, day before, the day before new gameplay, the day before updates, the day before update, the day before developers, the day before pvp, the day before fake, day before gameplay, the day before is actually real, the day before pc, the day before ps5

Id: tdQXfXm8rjg

Length: 47min 51sec (2871 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 15 2023