Controversial, PC-only shooter The Day Before is officially dead, barely a month and a half after its launch. Steam’s much-hyped zombie game, which saw developer Fntastic shutter its doors almost immediately after release, is now totally unplayable. For a few weeks following its disastrous debut, it existed in a state of limbo, but on January 22, The Day Before’s servers were switched off and various other aspects connected to the game, such as its official website, no longer function. RIP.
Read More: Dev Behind Controversial Shooter The Day Before Shuts Down Days After Massive Steam Launch [Update]
The Day Before was one of Steam’s most wishlisted titles of 2023, while courting controversy amongst gamers and industry members. The dev team incentivized volunteers to work on the project by offering “free codes” and “participation certificates” and in January of 2023, the game was pulled from Valve’s game distribution platform over supposed trademark issues that resulted in a nine-month delay. To put it bluntly, Fntastic’s zombie survival MMO has faced a litany of problems on the road to—and after—its early access launch on December 7, 2023. It was a dramatic saga that ended in flames as The Day Before had ceased operations mere days after its massive launch on Steam.
Now, as reported by IGN, the game’s servers are officially dead and buried. We already knew that The Day Before’s servers would shut down today; Fntastic said as much on X/Twitter on December 22. Well, the time has come. Pour one out for The Day Before, y’all.
The newly dead servers aren’t the only indication that the game, and the team behind it, are fading away like The Avengers after the snap. Fntastic hasn’t tweeted since that December 22 announcement, The Day Before’s website license has expired, and Fntastic’s website is now just a JPEG announcing the studio’s closure as of December 12. That’s a dead game if I’ve ever seen one.
Around the time that The Day Before was burning down, publisher Mytona promised that refunds would get issued automatically to any player who requested one. Interestingly, if you check Mytona’s website now, The Day Before is not listed anywhere. It seems we’re back to the day before The Day Before came out. Shit happens, amirite?
Kotaku has reached out to Mytona for comment.
Read More: The Day Before Dev Says ‘Shit Happens’ As It Deletes Everything
The Day Before wasn’t a good game. It had game-breaking bugs that blocked progress, glitches that saw environments disappear, flaws that caused characters to get stuck in the world, and many more problems. Maybe it’s better that the game got taken out to pasture, but with 2023 seeing 60 games die and this year seeing more than 3,400 industry layoffs in just its first few weeks, it’s still a bummer when any game gets killed off as the industry slowly consolidates and retracts.