"The Day Before" Developer Ceases Operations 3 Days Into Game Release, Steam Steps in with Refunds

[Timbaloo]

The Day Before...
more like The Day After

More like: The Pay Before.

 

[Denver]

I don't know the project. But looking at the numbers, I can't understand the reason for closing and not continuing to work on the game.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Yeah looked okay no idea what it sold for though
Probably to much for myself I'd never do a prepay.

 

[Dragokar]

Hi,
Yeah looked okay no idea what it sold for though
Probably to much for myself I'd never do a prepay.

They sold that asset assembly extraction/loot shooter in EA for €39.99 and delivered more or less none of the things they showed and mentioned before.

Also, they just opened up a new studio right after. When a fish stinks, it stinks.

 

[Pumper]

Why anyone would pay for Early Access to yet another boring derivative multiplayer shooter is beyond me. If you're that dumb you deserve to get scammed.

People seem to do that just to complain about it later and get upvotes on negative reviews on Steam. Makes no fucking sense.

 

[regs]

Why anyone would pay for Early Access to yet another boring derivative multiplayer shooter is beyond me. If you're that dumb you deserve to get scammed.

Big corpo lobbyist? Indies cannot develop other way. And big corpos sure do not want to have indies to develop large scale games, as they need an excuse to keep charging gamers AAA price, or even double and triple AAA prices in developing countries, for a sub-par A game. Hence why they launched smearing campaign here. And hence why they launch smearing campaign against Cyberpunk 2077.

 

[Regeneration]

Seriously. Just by the name you would know something fishy about this game.

 

[Yrd]

I could never make it past the stupid title.


What is the day before? Is that the setting? It's the ONE day before? It's post apocalyptic setting, so it's not the day before the apocalypse. The day before what?

In summation I absolutely hate the title.

 

[R0H1T]

The day before you get scammed

 

[WatchThe80s]

How bad was the game lol?

They delivered something else than what the promised.

 

[MarsM4N]

They even blatantly copied concept art from games & movies. It's also psychology wise very clever. "Subliminal Advertising". You just exploit the pre programmed minds.

The good thing is that consumers will be more aware to the concept of "Asset Flip Games". This will become more relevant from day to day. When you can just buy game assets and "LEGO" your game together with minimal game design skills, it just opens the flood gates for scams. Just look at the "FREE" games that get released each week at the EPIC Store. It's wild, lol.

Where is the route to profit for them? Steam doesn't transfer payment immediately, if Steam just refund everyone 3 days in, there is no way the devs got a cent of proceeding.

Steam does provide refunds only to those who ask for a refund. You have tons of people who are not familiar with Steams refund process or the ones who are just too lazy to go though it. All the money from them will go in their pockets. Pretty sure it will be at least 1/3rd.

IDK why people keep saying it's a scam. If it's a scam it's the worst performing scam in history.

Quick back of the napkin scam math: Let's say they sold a total of 200K copies keep 60% of the 8 million they made from steam sales of this game due to a 40%+ refund rate - lets say 4.8 Million, make it an even 5 pre tax:
They've been around since 2018... that's 5 years now, let's say there's only 5 people in the company and they're making on average (top guys more, juniors less etc) 180K a year with benefits and taxes that's costing them let's say 225K a year per person.

That's already 5.6M over 5 years just in staff, no other costs. I don't know what the cap table looks like, how much was fronted by the publisher, or how much other debt/"miscellaneous expenses" they've taken out, But there isn't enough money in the scamming portion to even come close to breakeven.

Unless they're selling drugs on the side there's no way for this to be an organized scam. Something / someone definitely got scammed, but I think it was internal rather than external - someone is holding the bag/crying under a desk right now.

Most of their "offices" are located in low wage eastern European countries where the average monthly income is around $1k, often even lower. It was also reported that many of their team where "volunteers", so they where basically working for free. Let's say 1/3rd refund the game, Steam takes a 30% share, very low staff costs, you're still walking out with a profit of around 1.8mil at best (minus the advertisement costs for Time Square commercials & of course Nvidia DLSS propaganda).

So that's really not bad for a product you put very low effort in. Dam, I should become a game DEV.

 

[csendesmark]

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
Open world
Crafting
Survival horror
Early access

 

[phanbuey]

They even blatantly copied concept art from games & movies. It's also psychology wise very clever. "Subliminal Advertising". You just exploit the pre programmed minds.

The good thing is that consumers will be more aware to the concept of "Asset Flip Games". This will become more relevant from day to day. When you can just buy game assets and "LEGO" your game together with minimal game design skills, it just opens the flood gates for scams. Just look at the "FREE" games that get released each week at the EPIC Store. It's wild, lol.


Steam does provide refunds only to those who ask for a refund. You have tons of people who are not familiar with Steams refund process or the ones who are just too lazy to go though it. All the money from them will go in their pockets. Pretty sure it will be at least 1/3rd.


Most of their "offices" are located in low wage eastern European countries where the average monthly income is around $1k, often even lower. It was also reported that many of their team where "volunteers", so they where basically working for free. Let's say 1/3rd refund the game, Steam takes a 30% share, very low staff costs, you're still walking out with a profit of around 1.8mil at best (minus the advertisement costs for Time Square commercials & of course Nvidia DLSS propaganda).

So that's really not bad for a product you put very low effort in. Dam, I should become a game DEV.

Yeah but the money office is in Singapore… I think they thought they were paying devs for to make a game, and those devs took them for a ride.

There was for sure a scam, but I’m thinking it was Eastern European dev teams taking the Singapore money for a long ride - because otherwise they would have made it a lot more profitable.

 

[HOkay]

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
Open world
Crafting
Survival horror
Early access

Haha, I just want to say that I agree so hard with this that I had to comment. I am so sick of open world crafting survival games! The only one missing is procedurally generated, just to make sure there's no well-crafted challenge to overcome & "levels" can be pumped out indefinitely.

 

[Charodiy_91]

That is why:
01) Pre-order games are sucks. You may make a pre-order if you are ready to say goodbye to your money. If a game would not be complete garbage like TDB (it does not deserve to be written by full name), Golum, or Cyberpunk 2077 (like it was at the start) so you are lucky.
02) Pre-order games that are making by developers that you know and you trust so much that you can give them your own money earned by sweat and tears.
03) If you are not ready to say bye-bye to money - Do Not make pre-orders, specially made by "orks" in "orkostan".