Summary
- Fntastic is suing Yakutia.Info for calling their game The Day Before a “scam.”
- The game faced public backlash for perceived similarities to other popular titles and numerous bugs.
- Yakutia.Info refuses to retract its statements and will countersue, arguing for freedom of speech.
Fntastic, the developer behind the notorious and short-lived multiplayer survival extraction shooter The Day Before is taking Russian website Yakutia.Info to court for calling the game a “scam.” The 2023 title, with a fluctuating genre and even more tenuous public perception, was originally announced in 2021. Fntastic’s then-upcoming project garnered a lot of excitement thanks to its interesting premise and teaser trailers. For a short while, The Day Before became the most wishlisted game on Steam leading up to its original release date, which was ultimately delayed a few times.
Along with the delays came a rather quick shift in public perception as people began to notice striking similarities between The Day Before‘s trailers and those of other popular games like The Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption 2, Tom Clancy’s The Division, Call of Duty, and even Cyberpunk 2077. But that marked just the beginning of the debacle, which would result in The Day Before going down on the negative side of gaming history, with members of the community, including news site Yakutia.Info, labeling the entire project a scam that had “borrowed gameplay mechanics from other games.”
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Fntastic, the developer of 2023’s The Day Before, apparently did not go softly into that good night as many assumed and instead announces a new game.
Despite many panning the extraction shooter, developer Fntastic seems to have taken umbrage with one entity in particular for calling The Day Before a scam. According to website Yakutia.Info (via 80 Level and machine translation), its base is in Yakutsk, Russia, the home region of Fntastic’s co-founder brothers, Eduard and Aisen Gotovtsev. The site revealed that it is being sued by the duo for its words in two articles, which have allegedly harmed Fntastic’s reputation.
Fntastic Takes Umbrage with Website’s Description of The Day Before
For its part, Yakutia.Info changed the word “scam” in one article to “embarrassment,” with the explanation that “scam” is relatively new to the Russian language and has a range of meanings, like “failure” and “fraud.” As for the site’s claim that Fntastic had copied gameplay mechanics from other titles for The Day Before, that was a direct quote from a video blog by media outlet IXBT Games, an “authoritative portal” in Russia. Furthermore, Yakutia.Info doubled down on its stance, stating that “the meaning of the articles remained unchanged but became more accurate.”
Despite these steps taken by Yakutia.Info to rectify the issue, Fntastic will only settle the case out of court if the website removes the offending articles and apologizes. Instead, the site has decided to fight back against what it deems to be “pressure on freedom of speech.” It refuses to remove the articles and will be countersuing Fntastic. Yakutia.Info also points out that it was not the only site to make such statements about the developer; yet the studio opted to only sue a small company. The statement by Yakutia.Info concludes by emphasizing that the Gotovtsev brothers “have remained at the level of amateurs.”
The comments beneath the Yakutia.Info’s announcement seem to support the website, with many people speaking out about the controversy surrounding The Day Before, its rocky release, and subsequent abrupt shutdown. Despite a lot of the readers seeming to agree with the assessment of the game being a scam, others have pointed out that Fntastic might nevertheless have a case for libel or something similar.
- Released
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December 7, 2023
- Developer(s)
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Fntastic
- Publisher(s)
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MYTONA