On 11 December, four days after The Day Before launched to widespread criticism, Fntastic announced their closure, stating that as their game had “failed financially” they could not afford to continue operating. The Day Before was removed from sale on Steam later that day.
Day Before was basically a scam though, and they kept the servers up for a few weeks.
By all accounts this was a real game. It’s just that nobody wanted to play it.
In the last 2 years we’ve seen these live-service games fail at launch time and time and time again. The execs need to just accept that Fortnite already exists and you can’t force that kind of success.
To the people that worked on it, even when the result kinda sucks, there’s some level of attachment. They spent literal years of their life investing into it. That might be where the tone is coming from.
Imagine working years on something and every time leadership has a meeting they keep asking you to add even more bullshit or change some stupid stuff. Must suck to be a game dev, I feel for them.
I’m not entirely oblivious to gaming news, but the literal first I had ever heard of this game was when they announced that it was being shut down. Methinks after eight years of development it could’ve had a few more dollars tossed into the marketing budget.
Word of mouth of something great/fun and exciting should be all the marketing a company really needs. I personally don’t trust or listen to any ads. They are cancer to the brain and eyes/ears because it’s typically lies or false claims…or they make cinematic trailers which don’t even represent the game at all because… cinematic.
That can even be a guide to many things like tools, if it’s pricy but has good word of mouth and not heavily advertised (sometimes the biggest expense) then it might just be worth the cash
I don’t think this game even lasted long enough for word of mouth to have popularized it. I didn’t hear about it until it was dead. I am wondering how many players Helldivers 2 had at 11 days (not a great example because it was an existing IP with existing fans). Could they have made it if the game had actually been good? I am not sure. Shutting down super fast got them more publicity than anything else they did.
I’m not against basic advertising, it fulfills a very useful role, letting you know a product exists, with what functionality and pricing and so on. Of course that’s a minority of advertising these days
Marketers actually place these into different categories of advertising goal. One kind might just exist to make people aware of a product and its role (eg, vacuum cleaner attachment) whereas others spend longer convincing customers it’s something they want/need. There’s yet another category that I think relates more to direct advertising and isn’t as common for mass products like games.
Yeah, they definitely didn’t market it very well, at least to the PC crowd. It seems the PlayStation version is doing much better, with advertisements in the PSN store.
I feel like the best you could possibly find is a game that uses a resource as payment that isn’t called “money,” but mechanically it would be the same.
But there is Minecraft. You can farm in that and you don’t need money (even though it exists in the form mentioned above). Or Project Zomboid which money exists as money but is only useful as toilet paper.
There is even a Star Trek-ish game where you have to produce to earn money to upgrade the ship for your crew. I get that it is a game mechanic, but seems like a perfect setting to not have money, and just concentrate on the people.
Honestly this reeks of corporate politics. I’m willing to bet at some point in development there was a regime change, and current management pushed this out the door just to clear the board.
Everything I heard about this came seems to indicate that it isn’t terrible by any means, just mediocre and overpriced in an absolutely oversaturated genre. If management was invested in it, they probably could have spent a ton on marketing, achieved middling numbers, and then used those middling numbers to justify continued development for another few months.
I’m confident in saying that because there are a handful of shitty live service games being operated at a loss for no real reason other than shutting them down would mean management would have to actually admit they fucked up.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne