Here is something that we don't really see every day, a gaming developer. What a complete surprise on that one. We live in a society where gaming communities and developers come together to create some of the best games and some of the worst games out there. Throughout the past few years, we've seen some mixbag results but when the pandemic hit in 2020, it took the Gaming Community to a crumble because of the low output of games and bad titles. No matter what, it is annoying. Well, for today's post we are talking about a Gaming Company named Fntastic which overhyped a trailer for an anticipated title but was met with extremely negative reviews thus shutting down the company.
Brief History / Origin:
Fntastic was founded in 2015 in Yakutsk, Russia by two guys named Eduard Gotovtsev and Aisen Gotovtsev. One of its partners who go by MyTona was founded in 2012 in the same place, but the headquarters are based in New Zealand. In the early years, Fntastic started growing their business and produced the first game in 2017 (also published by HypeTrain Digital) titled "The Wild Eight" before changing their names as well as changing the release date. The next year, they released two more games: Dead Dozen and Radiant One but the one title that was considered to be highly anticipated was The Day Before; an Apocalyptic open world MMO survival game set in a present day in the east coast.
What Went Horribly Wrong:
Advertising Another Game / 'Be A Volunteer' Campaign / Plagarising / Shutdown:
 |
| Identical fonts and the style of the textures. Image came from Reddit. |
 |
| Date of the announcement Trailer. January 27, 2021. IGN reposted it on January 29. |
 |
| Trademark registered by Sun Jae LEE on May 21, 2021. |
However, this is where the history ends for them. Sometime in 2021, Fntastic announced the highly anticipated game they were releasing known as The Day Before. It was essentially what they would refer to it as 'the next gen' of survival games. Fntastic would do these things called mega events on their channel where they would showcase the game they've been developing on a livestream. During this time they would have issues with some of the streams. Then they hyped up The Day Before but as a coverup to release another game they were working on called 'Propnight.' While Propnight was received somewhat positive at launch, it eventually fell into in the mixbag category. It was also a game that people weren't asking for because of the hype train for The Day Before.
Fntastic was also in hot water due to plagiarizing as well as not owning the rights to the trademark. The plagiarizing aspects was copying the similar style and font design from another popular game 'The Last of Us.' The screenshot above shows the fonts and the style being literally identical, from the same font and the smear textures. Another problem was registering the trademark. Fntastic showed the game on January 27, 2021 (reposted to IGN on January 29) but didn't registered the trademark yet. 4 months later on May 21, 2021, a person by the name of Sun Jae LEE (who has made a Calendar Application for phones) aquired the trademark. Fntastic waited two whole years to register the trademark but failed miserably. This prompted them to release a tweet stating that some of The Day Before videos were removed because of the trademark.
There was also more scrutiny against the company itself. A year prior in the summer of 2022, they announced a thing on their website (since deleted but archived on Twitter) titled 'Be a Volunteer.' When you sign up to be part of the team, you get access to Community Moderation, Paid in Participation Certificates and Free Game Codes. This however didn't work as to plan or at least in their own words because many of the volunteers were unpaid. When they came out to defend this, their statement didn't match up to what they originally said, instead they only give out salaries to Full-Time Volunteers rather than the Part-Time Volunteers. It really doesn't make any sense when you add it up.
But then on January 3, 2023, Fntastic makes a video titled 'Life at Fntastic.' In the video they explain a similar tactic with the volunteer scandal as well as showing clips of the game people had promise and somewhat of it's progress. However, this video was just an ad promoting an application called The Continent App. This is just nothing but a Zoom clone or of its predecessors. Shortly after the video went up, they updated the description to have link directly to The Continent App. As a result, this did not sit well with users and when they got called out on it, they changed the description to fntastic.com and temporarily removed the comment section of that video.
But just when you thought that you're hopes were going to fall for this game, well it's about to fall even more harder. On December 7, 2023, The Day Before was officially released to the public on steam and to our surprise, it was met with overwhelmingly negative reception mostly because of the assets they used. Fntastic took 2 years to develope this game when just by looking at it, you can do the same exact thing within a matter of days. Why take so long to do this is beyond me. Then four days later on December 11, Fntastic released a statement on Twitter stating that they're shutting down. This put the community into a complete frenzy thus ending up with the review bomb of the game. They would also issue refunds to the people who were dissatisfied.
To hide their suspicious activity with them trying to fight back. They would call out the rumors saying that the name change was a lie. Few days prior to that on the Steamdb Info page for one of their games (The Wild Eight), it clearly shows that the name was in fact changed so for them to continuously lie over and over and over again is absurd. Good riddance on a company that failed to deliver a good product I suppose. KiraTV inspired me to do a post on this so I recommend checking his channel out.
No comments:
Post a Comment