What Really Happened at The Day Before?
There is a new documentary out by German game sites Game Two and GameStar that sheds more light on the disastrous development of The Day Before. The documentary says it spoke to 16 former Fntastic employees, 1 former “volunteer,” and seven Mytona staff about the development.
In an anonymous interview with Game Two, the source claims that working at Fntastic, The Day Before’s defunct development studio was pure chaos. Development was buffeted by the Gotovtsev brothers’ changes to the scope and style of the game.
Notably, the Gotovtsev brothers, who are the founders of Fntastic, tried to copy the gameplay style or format of the hot game of the month. This led to an unstable lore and game program. According to sources, the game’s character creator had to be overhauled multiple times to keep up with GTA Online, Hogwarts Legacy, and Baldur’s Gate 3.
A former dev says he only learned the game was going to be an MMO when he saw the trailer for it. The setting in the game had to be dramatically changed from a smoky, oppressive city to a bright, friendly one after one of the brothers played Spider-Man 2
There have been some concerns about the way Fntastic treated its staff, but those are dwarfed by the reports about how the staff was abused by the studio. As a company that uses volunteer workers on its projects, some of these allegations can only be described as mind-blowing. FNtastic employed a great deal of young, inexperienced labor from Yakutsk as well as Kazakhstan and Armenia, two countries in the former USSR.
According to sources, there was a lot of voluntary overtime and months of crunch—one says, “I found myself begging for a few hours’ break just to take a shower or eat”—but that’s not all.
Game Two’s sources report that employees were fined for submitting substandard work, some of whom were reportedly forced to pay $1,930 for poor-quality voice recordings.