2023 was a very eventful year in the video game industry, not only because it left us with gems like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3but also calamities such as Goofy and especially The day beforewhich turned out to be one of the biggest consumer scams in the history of video games, or at least one of the most watched in the media.

At this point, only people who don’t follow current video games don’t know about the big scandal that happened around The day beforea title that promised to be one of the best releases of 2023 and that It ended up being one of the most notorious scams in the history of the industry. It goes without saying that this is a game that aspired to triple-A and ended up showing a much lower quality than what was promised through the trailers released before its launch.

The day before It came to the market practically broken and with a build quality worthy of an amateur rather than a professional and experienced. This poor quality is also reflected in the graphics, which were far below what was promised, despite the use of Unreal Engine 5, which saved the furniture a bit.

The Day Before removed from Steam.

Mark to The day before legally as a fraud is a task for the courts, but from a moral and even technical point of view it is obvious that it can be seen to be a prank created on the basis of assets for the Unreal Engine itself.

Keep using it assets It’s legit because they can help speed up development and cover parts that the development team doesn’t control, but here We are faced with an alleged case of copying and pasting elements here and there without much discretion and without care for coherence.. In short, it’s like someone building an app by copying and pasting code from Stack Overflow without fully understanding what they’re doing.

Between the mediocrity of the product itself and the frustration of unfulfilled expectations, The day before He was massacred by both specialist critics and the public. The scandal went so far as to depose the game’s developer Fntastic in an episode somewhat reminiscent of Gollum.

pic.twitter.com/GIX4ZAztny

— The Day Before (@playdaybefore) December 22, 2023

Disaster around The day beforewhich is an MMO set in an apocalyptic world, hinted that the title could die soon, and after being pulled from Steam, the game’s official X account, now owned by publisher Mytona, announced that The servers will be shut down on January 22, 2024, in addition to “Steam will now proactively refund all remaining players”.

Mytona seems to be working with Valve to make it as easy as possible to get a refund for anyone who bought The day before, even after compliance with legal deadlines and deadlines set by the platform itself. In addition, any remaining players who did not get their money back will receive a proactive refund from Steam, meaning that the ex offo process was initiated by Valve rather than the user (we assume that Steam cannot force the user to return the product).

In short, nothing that couldn’t have been predicted by looking at the events and that Fntastic and Mytona were cornered after revealing what they really are The day before. We will see if there is any type of demand after completion or during this closing and return process.