The relevancy of The Day Before might have died already, but new information keeps emerging.
The Day Before, an online zombie shooter that plays much like Tom Clancy’s Division, was abandoned not a month before its release. The reasons were quite obvious, such as the game not being finished, promises not being met and the developers being shady with no proper feedback. The release day arrived and people were furious that their game showcased for the past four or so years was not true at all, therefore Fntastic had to straight out cancel its existence.
Oddly, the company behind the game mostly had volunteers working in the background for the project instead of actual workers, as they stated. With a new report coming in, this was proven to be untrue. The report states that, along with one volunteer, fifteen or so people who worked on The Day Before were mistreated if they happened to make a mistake while developing the game. Some of the workers also voiced their perspectives, stating it was a toxic environment with no proper direction given, so it was bound to fail regardless of how hard they would try.
From the logs gathered, some workers were fined upwards of two thousand dollars for turning in low-quality voice recordings for the characters, subsequently, the workers who had no will to participate were also threatened not to get paid at all. The details of 16 hours of daily work with no weekend off are also quite concerning, this type of forceful order to work is called crunch time and it is rather common to see developers crunch time in order to reach the project’s release in time.
Fntastic is obviously no more, thanks to the scandalous release of The Day Before, and we do not expect it to return any time soon. However, the damage to the workers has already affected their lives. Working in the gaming market is considered as dangerous as people can either face harassment due to poor reception, crunch time due to publishers’ extreme requests, or be fired just for existing, like how it is going on with mass firings happening in gaming companies nowadays.
