The Day Before... the week after & the scam before

Fntastic Studio, founded by russian developers and developed the acclaimed unplayable The Day Before, announced its closure due to the financial collapse of the game. The company will not finalize the game, and all revenues will be used to pay off debts to partners. Players did not cheer the company on. Currently, on Steam, out of 18,000 reviews, 81% of reviews are negative.

Let's dive into the swamp a bit and find out what the problem is + I'll tell you how to get a refund of The Day Before on Steam even after 2 hours.

The funniest thing is that immediately after the failure of the game and the closure of the company, the russian gaming community backed up and said that "Fntastic studio and publisher MYTONA - both were founded in Russia, today are foreign companies" and, in general, no one ever said that they were Russian and that they were proud of them ??

The Day Before scandals

Even after the first announcements, The Day Before game became very popular. You can say viral. So it became one of the most desired games on Steam.

From that moment, as it is customary in the best Russian traditions, an avalanche of scandals began. The game page, at one point, simply disappeared from the online game store.

The Russian developer Fntastic claimed that the problem was allegedly in the game's name. Therefore, the page had to be removed at the request of a private individual. In plain language, the developers banally stole someone else's patented name for their game.

The Day Before after

Although, we should not have expected anything else from the Russian developers. One of the main reasons for dissatisfaction was the change in the project's original concept. Instead of the promised open world for survival, like The Division by Massive Entertainment - A Ubisoft Studio or DayZ, the developers offered small locations, like Escape from Tarkov, with tons of bugs and a $40 price tag.

The lies began at the stage of the project's inception, even then players suspected something wrong, as the trailers copied many elements from successful games.

A day before the start of early access, Fntastic studio released an interesting address to the community - "revelations". The team apologized for inept marketing and promised many surprises, as they didn't show the game itself. In The Day Before, it's as if everything was created by trial and error: we do everything, and something will work out.

Players have also noticed that Fntastic has removed many old clips of the game from their YouTube channel. Judging by the comments, they find it suspicious.

It turns out that the game was almost entirely made of other people's assets - the author of some of them collected a hundred packs from the Unreal Engine store.

How to get a refund of The Day Before on Steam even after 2 hours

The network also began to spread the instructions of one of the Redditors on how to try to get a refund for The Day Before in Steam, even if the player spent more than 2 hours in it. According to reviews, this method does help to successfully issue a refund, but it does not happen in 100% of cases.

The author of the instructions emphasized that the automated refund system will deny the request if the person spent more than two hours in the game. Therefore, you need to open the request manually.

Open a refund request in Steam and specify three links in it:

1. Forbes article about the game not matching the trailers
2. Statement of Fntastic about the closure of the studio
3. Steam documentation that outlines the rules of early access

Describe the problems you encountered with the game. Don't mention any legal aspects and avoid them in your first request - Steam support doesn't like that.

You can mention that The Day Before was released using bait and switch, an online scam designed to mislead buyers. In this case, you can provide Steam with videos and other materials that compare the release version of the game to the one that Fntastic promoted in advertisements.

If the player spends more than 2 hours in the game, Steam rarely refunds money to a bank card or PayPal account. Therefore, it is recommended to request a refund to your Steam wallet.