Where is the line between exaggerated PR clichés as part of effective marketing and outright lies, which ultimately have to be classified as such? "Marketing wrong" and therefore be directly criminal? This topic has been raised again and again over the past decade in our wonderful video game industry, and of course several parameters must be taken into account when explaining your position on this issue. Of course, I remember when Sony’s old boss bragged that the PS2 was like connecting your brain to the Matrix, or that the PS3 could easily display games at 120 FPS. I remember when the team behind Fable touted the game as infinitely larger and more dynamic than any other role-playing game ever made, and when Guerrilla Games demoed Killzone 2 using what was originally claimed to be a pre-rendered film clip "Real-time rendering"but then it turned out it was a complete hoax.
Not much has improved in recent years. We all remember how incredibly promising Sega’s ambitious Aliens: Colonial Marines looked in advance and how excited we were for its release. The final product contained barely a small percentage of what was promised, and Sega was sued and forced to pay large fines to those who purchased the game based on false assumptions or outright lies. Of course, the same thing happened with Polish house CD Projekt’s much-lauded action role-playing game Cyberpunk 2077, which contained around 40% of all previously promised features and systems, just as Microsoft marketed Forza. Motorsport (2023) as "100% built from scratch" In reality, it was nothing more than a revamped Forza Motorsport 7 with lots of polygonal models (the cars) carried over from Forza 3 (and Forza 4) from 15 years ago.
Where is the line between clever, effective marketing and outright lies? The now-defunct Russian indie studio Fntastic certainly asked themselves this question during the development of the recently released The Day Before, but at some point decided that anything was possible. All means. All methods. All modes. And that’s where they started. Over the last two years, we gamers have been fed delicious little samples of what was essentially marketed as an online role-playing game smacked of The Last of Us. A gigantic and completely open online world, imbued with intricate and deep role-playing systems, in which your mission and that of your companions is to survive a zombie-infested post-apocalypse by any means necessary. In the last six months there has been quite a storm surrounding this project, as it was accused of being a pure rip-off, a blatant plagiarism of The Last of Us, and at one point was completely removed from Steam, after which The developers started making problems with it responsible for the name and copyright.
“The Day Before” is now available on "Early access", cost 39.99 on Steam (it has already been removed from the platform) and was the center of attention of almost all streamers over the weekend, as the marketing of the game itself was very effective and, in many ways, intelligently designed. I spent two days with Fntastic’s ambitious MMO and came to an important and final conclusion: the game was and remains a complete rip-off. A clever, but now transparent way for a group of limited game developers to get maximum investment from various stakeholders (and players) through fake, misrepresented trailers and staging, and then blame it on time constraints or fierce competition.
As we all know (and understand) “Early Access” means early access to a game that is not yet ready, but considering that developers like Fntastic charge 39.99 dollars for their product, I think as editor-in-chief of Gamereactor always considers that it is more than legitimate to evaluate a product of this type, although there are usually minor technical problems with titles released in this format. However, The Day Before is not "a little broken" and not only contains "a few bugs", but it’s a big, huge mistake. The Day Before doesn’t work as a game. It freezes and crashes, it throws away saved files, it forces me as a player to start over again and again, it makes me suddenly two stories tall and completely bloated, it makes me stuck on the floor and like a normal old man slip farmer’s carpet and everything else. This is not a beta version of an up-and-coming game, but a hastily concocted scam project in which the developers have lied, cheated and defrauded players and investors since the product was released "finish" Doesn’t keep a single promise, it’s easy for me to dismiss it entirely. First of all, this wasn’t a game. It was a scam, and the fact that Fntastic is now announcing the closure of its business just three days after launching says it all.
