Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts. And how the
Speaker 1: tech are yet? So I thought we would talk today
Speaker 1: about the day before, and I don't mean Sunday. So
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one, an obscure game developer company called Fantastic,
Speaker 1: a company that ditched the first A in Fantastic for
Speaker 1: its name, launched a trailer for an upcoming video game.
Speaker 1: The trailer showed third person over the shoulder scenes of
Speaker 1: characters navigating desolate landscapes, flavor text on newspapers indicating the
Speaker 1: deadly pandemic had spanned the world, and scenes of zombie
Speaker 1: like people bearing down on the characters, and a voiceover
Speaker 1: called the game an open world, multiplayer survival game. The
Speaker 1: trailer claimed to feature gameplay footage as two characters scavenge
Speaker 1: for supplies, receive a radio invitation to join a survivor colony,
Speaker 1: and of course, fight off zombies and rogue player groups.
Speaker 1: It also showed off crafting, dynamic weather events, and more.
Speaker 1: Other trailers would show off players seemingly teaming up to
Speaker 1: explore dynamic and interesting environments, including abandoned but still surprisingly
Speaker 1: very well lit shopping malls, or another trailer showed off
Speaker 1: what the outskirts of the city looked like, complete with
Speaker 1: woodlands and the occasional vehicle containing a little zombie surprise
Speaker 1: in it. The implication was that this was a massively
Speaker 1: multiplayer online survival horror game, and it was called The
Speaker 1: Day Before, and gamers took notice. In fact, at one point,
Speaker 1: The Day Before ranked number one on Steam wish lists.
Speaker 1: That is, if you have a Steam account, the online
Speaker 1: video games store platform Steam, well, you can designate titles
Speaker 1: to be on your wish list, and then that helps
Speaker 1: you keep an eye on when those games come out,
Speaker 1: or if they go on sale or release new content,
Speaker 1: or you can just let folks know that if they
Speaker 1: want to get you something, well, the games on your
Speaker 1: wish list are a decent option. So anticipation was running
Speaker 1: really high. It looked like The Day Before was going
Speaker 1: to bring together elements found in lots of other games,
Speaker 1: such as Seven Days to Die, Day, z GTA Online,
Speaker 1: Escape from Tarkov, and lots more. While lots of games
Speaker 1: had some elements of what appeared to already be in
Speaker 1: the day before. This looked like one of those rare
Speaker 1: combos that just matched a bunch of complimentary pieces together
Speaker 1: to make something new, kind of like when you get
Speaker 1: peanut butter on your chocolate. Jump ahead a couple of
Speaker 1: years and then a few more delays. The game actually
Speaker 1: came out this year, just a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 1: In fact, launched in early access through the Steam Store
Speaker 1: on December seventh, twenty twenty three, and four days later, Fantastic,
Speaker 1: the video game studio that made the day before, announced
Speaker 1: it was shutting down, and gamers were flooding Steam with
Speaker 1: overwhelmingly negative reviews for the day before. The general consensus
Speaker 1: was that the game that Fantastic delivered was a far
Speaker 1: cry from what it had promised. So today I thought
Speaker 1: we'd talk a bit about where Fantastic came from, what
Speaker 1: has happened to it, and why gamers were so upset
Speaker 1: about the day before. So our story begins actually with
Speaker 1: the predecessor to Fantastic. Before choosing that name, a group
Speaker 1: of developers who would go on to become Fantastic, at
Speaker 1: least some of them, formed a company called eight Points.
Speaker 1: They started their company in Siberia, Russia. According to a
Speaker 1: Kickstarter post they made more about that in a second.
Speaker 1: They were quote all from different studios where many of
Speaker 1: us had been working on cash games. We quickly realized
Speaker 1: our passion was not with casual titles, but for deeply
Speaker 1: immersive experiences end quote. Now among the members of eight
Speaker 1: Points was lead developer Edward Gotoftsev, a name that is
Speaker 1: going to trip me up over and over again, and
Speaker 1: his brother Eisen will also be very important later on
Speaker 1: in this story. So for the first project of eight Points,
Speaker 1: the group decided on a quote plot driven survival co
Speaker 1: op game end quote, and they called it The Wild Eight.
Speaker 1: The premise was that a group of eight survivors of
Speaker 1: a plane crash have to work together to survive in
Speaker 1: a harsh, cold environment, not that much different from the
Speaker 1: frozen tundra of Siberia, it would turn out. But plot twist,
Speaker 1: one of the survivors gets tagged to be a quote
Speaker 1: unquote psycho and is actively attempting to sabotage the team's efforts.
Speaker 1: So there's some hidden identity elements to this game as well.
Speaker 1: So the kickstary campaign laid out some interesting features. You know,
Speaker 1: death was nearly certain as the environmental dangers ranged from
Speaker 1: freezing to death to being attacked by wolves and bears
Speaker 1: and maybe some less natural kind of critters. Characters could
Speaker 1: be revived, but with the psycho element in the game,
Speaker 1: there would always be the question of whether it might
Speaker 1: be better if you left a character to stay dead
Speaker 1: because maybe that character was the psycho. It was a
Speaker 1: neat idea. The team was asking for fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 1: to complete the game, noting that all of the team
Speaker 1: had really sacrificed much of their own money to work
Speaker 1: on this project. This was in twenty fifteen, and they
Speaker 1: said they were aiming for a late twenty sixteen release.
Speaker 1: Backers actually on two hundred and fifty seven backers helped
Speaker 1: the team meet their goal, funding the kickstarter with fifty
Speaker 1: nine thousand, six hundred and forty four dollars worth of pledges. Now,
Speaker 1: the team finished the game, but it took a little
Speaker 1: bit longer than what they wanted, just a little bit.
Speaker 1: The game actually launched an early access in February twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't finished yet, but it was in early access.
Speaker 1: All was not well within eight points, however, there was
Speaker 1: some sort of internal disagreement among the group. I have
Speaker 1: never been able to see what that actually was. I
Speaker 1: did a lot of digging to see if there was
Speaker 1: any more detail on this, but there wasn't. But ultimately
Speaker 1: there was a schism within eight Points, and so eight
Speaker 1: Points sold the Wild eight to a publisher called hype
Speaker 1: Train Digital, and at least some of the folks from
Speaker 1: eight Points, including Edward, would leave to form a new
Speaker 1: company that would become Fantastic. As for the Wild Eight,
Speaker 1: that game would continue to go through development. It would
Speaker 1: launch in final form in twenty nineteen, and recently hype
Speaker 1: Train changed the name of the developer because it had
Speaker 1: been saying Fantastic, they changed it to eight point or
Speaker 1: eight Points, back to the original name of the developer
Speaker 1: group because of the fallout that is going on with
Speaker 1: the day before. So Edward names himself CEO of this
Speaker 1: new company. His brother Eisen comes on as a co founder.
Speaker 1: Both of them reportedly put in around fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 1: of their own money into the company as capital. That's
Speaker 1: actually in Singapore dollars, I should add, because they based
Speaker 1: the company in Singapore at least in name, and a
Speaker 1: Singapore dollar is worth about seventy five cents American Now.
Speaker 1: According to former employees, the company didn't actually maintain a
Speaker 1: physical office space. They did use a co op space
Speaker 1: as a sort of virtual office, but they didn't really
Speaker 1: maintain a real world brick and mortar office within Singapore.
Speaker 1: They did produce a few actual game titles. They made
Speaker 1: a first person shooter survival horror game called Dead Dozen Again,
Speaker 1: with a mechanic for players to turn against each other.
Speaker 1: One player would be playing a zombie like ghoul, and
Speaker 1: if you succeeded in killing another player, they would then
Speaker 1: become a ghoul, so it became kind of a last
Speaker 1: man's standing sort of game. They made an adventure game
Speaker 1: called Radiant One that showed the studio's more artistic side,
Speaker 1: and they made an asymmetric multiplayer game called prop Night,
Speaker 1: in which one player takes on the role of a
Speaker 1: hunter killer type and all the other players attempt to
Speaker 1: hide within an environment by disguising themselves as common inanimate objects,
Speaker 1: and then when they are relatively safe, they tried to
Speaker 1: repair some stations to allow them to escape, kind of
Speaker 1: a prop hunt slash Dead by Daylight mash up here.
Speaker 1: This s dollar game was made popular from a Gary's
Speaker 1: mod game that was being prop Hunt that came out
Speaker 1: several years earlier. In twenty twenty one, the year the
Speaker 1: studio released prop Night, they also unveiled a trailer for
Speaker 1: their new game. The trailer referenced it as the open world,
Speaker 1: multiplayer survival game, and in this game, like I said, Appendem,
Speaker 1: had wiped out most of the world's populations, leaving cities
Speaker 1: empty of everyone but a few survivors and occasionally an
Speaker 1: infected person who's more or less a zombie. The trailer
Speaker 1: and others that would follow gave gamers the impression that
Speaker 1: it was set in a persistent online world, that it
Speaker 1: would bring together elements of massively multiplayer online games, survival,
Speaker 1: horror games, crafting and base building games, et cetera. While
Speaker 1: there was some initial skepticism about whether or not this
Speaker 1: small and still relatively unknown studio could achieve this massive project,
Speaker 1: some folks were actually starting to get excited, and that
Speaker 1: was what was leading to more and more people adding
Speaker 1: this title onto their Steam wish lists. It became the
Speaker 1: number one wish listed game on the platform in October
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one. Fantastic said the game would be out
Speaker 1: by June twenty first, two thousand two, some more trailers
Speaker 1: would come out proclaiming even more amazing features that the
Speaker 1: game would have, and then the studio kind of went quiet.
Speaker 1: And that was already starting to worry people, right, like
Speaker 1: the hype machine was an overdrive, and then things went
Speaker 1: to radio silence. When we come back, I'll talk about
Speaker 1: what happened. Okay, So, as I mentioned before the break,
Speaker 1: we had Fantastic going to radio silence in the months
Speaker 1: leading up to what was supposed to be the release.
Speaker 1: But in May twenty twenty two, which was just a
Speaker 1: month before it was supposed to come out. Remember, originally
Speaker 1: the publication date was supposed to be June twenty first,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, May twenty twenty two, Fantastic issues a
Speaker 1: statement saying the game would be delayed by at least
Speaker 1: eight months. The reason for the del according to the company,
Speaker 1: was that the team decided on using a different game engine.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that would definitely set you back a lot,
Speaker 1: asked the folks who worked on Duke Nukem Forever, another
Speaker 1: game that was in development for ages. So the move
Speaker 1: to a new engine struck more than a few people
Speaker 1: as a questionable decision. It's not like you can just
Speaker 1: lift all your assets that you built for your starting
Speaker 1: game engine and then just port them to another one seamlessly.
Speaker 1: So this is where some folks were really starting to
Speaker 1: smell or aunt. Then we got another big reveal, one
Speaker 1: that I think would have totally made me rage out
Speaker 1: had I been following this story at the time. In
Speaker 1: June twenty twenty two, around the time that it was
Speaker 1: originally supposed to launch, word got out that Fantastic depends
Speaker 1: at least in part on volunteer labor. So they had
Speaker 1: a distinction between full time volunteers whom they say they
Speaker 1: were paid, which to just sounds like an employee, and
Speaker 1: part time volunteers who were not people who would work
Speaker 1: without being paid for it. They might receive some other
Speaker 1: form of compensation. The company appeared to be targeting fans
Speaker 1: who had some developer skills to work with them in
Speaker 1: return for stuff like game codes for example. So yeah,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't need to buy a copy of the game.
Speaker 1: You just have to work on developing the game for free,
Speaker 1: and then you get hooked up. Others might do work
Speaker 1: for exposure. This is where I remind you you cannot
Speaker 1: make a living from exposure, but you sure can die
Speaker 1: from it. Fantastic later said that volunteers weren't responsible for
Speaker 1: coding or anything like that. Instead, they were doing other
Speaker 1: jobs like community management or working on localization, you know
Speaker 1: where you're trying to craft the game so that it
Speaker 1: is understandable and playable for people in different regions of
Speaker 1: the world. Meanwhile, more delays were around the corner. In
Speaker 1: January twenty twenty three, Fantastic announced that there was an issue.
Speaker 1: Apparently a calendar app also called the day before, objected
Speaker 1: to the video games title, and so the companies needed
Speaker 1: to work out a solution. The release date was moved
Speaker 1: from March first, twenty twenty three, to November tenth. It
Speaker 1: would actually release into early access on December seventh. Now,
Speaker 1: the two brothers told IGN that the IP dispute was
Speaker 1: just a complication and that the studio had actually already
Speaker 1: decided to delay the game. So this seemed to contradict
Speaker 1: what they had just said, and the dispute apparently just
Speaker 1: coincided with the company's plan to announce the delay. So
Speaker 1: again it appeared that there was some contradictions in communications
Speaker 1: to the public, and that was exacerbating concerns about the
Speaker 1: game at this point. Now there's another party involved in
Speaker 1: this that we have to talk about. There is a
Speaker 1: video game publisher called Mytona. Like Fantastics predecessor, Mytona is
Speaker 1: a company that's from Siberia, Russia. Also, coincidentally, it was
Speaker 1: co founded by brothers, different set of brothers. These are
Speaker 1: twin brothers who co founded my Tona. Apparently my Tona
Speaker 1: had invested in development of the Day Before. This is
Speaker 1: not unusual, you know, publishers will invest money to help
Speaker 1: fund the creation or development of a game. But I
Speaker 1: bet these days that my Tona really wishes it hadn't
Speaker 1: done that. Anyway, the repeated delays were making gamers increasingly uneasy.
Speaker 1: Some had been referring to the Day Before as a
Speaker 1: scam for a few months at this point. That was
Speaker 1: an accusation that the brothers denied. They also said that
Speaker 1: it wasn't just an asset flip. That's when you get
Speaker 1: a bunch of pre existing assets and then you just
Speaker 1: sort of cobbled together a game from them. The brothers
Speaker 1: were saying, no, that's not you don't understand how much
Speaker 1: work is being done on this title. That is not
Speaker 1: an accurate portrayal of what this is. An official statement
Speaker 1: from Fantastic said the game had been development for four years.
Speaker 1: That's something that some people began to question because again,
Speaker 1: a lot of what the trailers were showing were things
Speaker 1: that look like assets that had been built for the
Speaker 1: Unreal Engine but hadn't existed for more than a year
Speaker 1: and a half or so. So there were questions about
Speaker 1: how could this game have been in development that long
Speaker 1: when the stuff that you're showing off hasn't even existed
Speaker 1: for four years. Now, at this stage, some gamers were
Speaker 1: taking a closer look at the stuff Fantastic put out
Speaker 1: in trailers. They did point out similarities between the game
Speaker 1: and various asset packs that are up for purchase as
Speaker 1: part of the Unreal Engine. And I've talked a bit
Speaker 1: about asset packs. Let me explain what those are. This
Speaker 1: is stuff that has already been built on top of
Speaker 1: a game engine. Some developers have already created these assets
Speaker 1: that you can purchase and then incorporate into your own project.
Speaker 1: And these aren't necessarily just visual assets. A lot of
Speaker 1: them are a lot of them are things that are
Speaker 1: you know, like objects or structures that have both the
Speaker 1: visual element and the geometry right, like a house with
Speaker 1: multiple floors, you have to program all that in well packs,
Speaker 1: you could purchase these things and incorporate them into your
Speaker 1: game and with some tweaking, make it all work. It's
Speaker 1: not like it's plug and play. It's not that simple. Actually,
Speaker 1: it does require quite a bit of work to get
Speaker 1: an asset to work within the world of your game,
Speaker 1: so I don't want to dismiss that. But it also
Speaker 1: means that you don't have to do everything from scratch, right,
Speaker 1: You don't have to build every single element in your
Speaker 1: game by hand, because you can actually purchase stuff that's
Speaker 1: already been made, and that can really help. However, some
Speaker 1: gamers also began to say that the Day Before was
Speaker 1: going beyond this and actually copying not just assets, but
Speaker 1: like existing game trailers in order to make their own trailers.
Speaker 1: They said that there were elements in game trailers for
Speaker 1: the Day Before that were directly lifting from a trailer
Speaker 1: for Grand Theft, Auto five or Call of Duty, Black
Speaker 1: Ops Cold War. So those questions were starting to get
Speaker 1: more heated as well were really starting to look grim.
Speaker 1: But on December seventh, twenty twenty three, Fantastic did release
Speaker 1: the day before in early access for thirty nine dollars
Speaker 1: and sold around two hundred thousand copies of it, with
Speaker 1: a statement saying that the studio hoped to emerge from
Speaker 1: early access within six to eight months to be a
Speaker 1: fully released game, whereupon it would cost forty nine dollars,
Speaker 1: so you know, buying an early access safety ten bucks.
Speaker 1: And it turns out none of that would be relevant.
Speaker 1: It was all moot. It would never get the chance
Speaker 1: to go to full release because right away gamers began
Speaker 1: to film their gameplay sessions and compare their sessions against
Speaker 1: the trailers to show the disparity between the actual experience
Speaker 1: of playing the game versus the game that was being
Speaker 1: showed off in trailers for a couple of years at
Speaker 1: that point. They also complained that it was really hard
Speaker 1: to get a gaming session going because the servers could
Speaker 1: only hold around a one hundred people per server, and
Speaker 1: they filled up really fast. I mean, you sold two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand copies super fast, so that requires a lot
Speaker 1: of servers for you to be able to actually facilitate gameplay.
Speaker 1: Then you had the really problematic issue where gamers found
Speaker 1: out that the day before was not an MMO survival
Speaker 1: horror game at all. Instead, it really belonged to a
Speaker 1: different kind of genre called an extraction shooter. So in
Speaker 1: an extraction shooter, gamers enter into an online map and
Speaker 1: they're only in it for a certain amount of time.
Speaker 1: And while they're in this online map, they do their
Speaker 1: best to collect resources and to complete certain objectives, and
Speaker 1: then they need to make their way to an extraction
Speaker 1: point before their time runs out or they lose everything
Speaker 1: that they gained in that session. But there's no persistent world, right,
Speaker 1: It's not like you can leave a bit building or
Speaker 1: hide a stash into building and then come back three
Speaker 1: days later and get that stash. You can't do that.
Speaker 1: There's also no elements of role playing games in the
Speaker 1: Day Before either, so gamers felt like they had been bamboozled.
Speaker 1: They said, this is not the same game that was
Speaker 1: being sold to us. Later, an anonymous former developer for
Speaker 1: Fantastic told Eurogamer that not only was The Day Before
Speaker 1: not an MMO, but that there had never been a
Speaker 1: plan to make it an MMO in the first place,
Speaker 1: that that was clearly beyond their abilities, and that it
Speaker 1: should never have been marketed as an MMO. The game
Speaker 1: would be played on servers. Like I said, they could
Speaker 1: support like one hundred people, way too small for a
Speaker 1: classic MMO, and without role playing or in game plans
Speaker 1: or raids or anything like that, it just didn't meet
Speaker 1: the definition. The game that was being marketed was just
Speaker 1: not the same one that was actually development. And this
Speaker 1: former dev also said that when team members would bring
Speaker 1: up concerns to the brothers and say, hey, you know,
Speaker 1: we're misleading people, this is not the same sort of
Speaker 1: game that we're actually making, they were often ignored, or worse,
Speaker 1: they were moved off the project. The former developer also
Speaker 1: claimed that the brothers frequently changed their minds as to
Speaker 1: what should be in the game, and this contributed significantly
Speaker 1: to production delays because you would be working to add
Speaker 1: features in or take features out, or change direction, and obviously,
Speaker 1: without a unified approach to the direction of a game,
Speaker 1: you're not going to have a smooth development process. Okay,
Speaker 1: still got a little bit left to say about what
Speaker 1: went on with the day before. Before I get to that,
Speaker 1: Let's take another quick break, all right. As I said,
Speaker 1: this former developer with Fantastic was saying that there never
Speaker 1: had been plans to make this game an MMO, something
Speaker 1: that really shouldn't come as a surprise based upon what
Speaker 1: was released, but it really shows the difference between the
Speaker 1: marketing and the development. Meanwhile, gamers were flooding Steam with
Speaker 1: more negative reviews. The game wasn't really stable. Servers were
Speaker 1: filling up so quickly that players were often left waiting
Speaker 1: for ages for a session availability, only to feel disappointed
Speaker 1: once they actually were able to connect to a session.
Speaker 1: And this is part of what made the story so notable,
Speaker 1: because it went from being one of the most highly
Speaker 1: anticipated titles on Steam to one almost universally reviled by
Speaker 1: the player base that had purchased the title. That made
Speaker 1: it really interesting, It was probably not so interesting to Fantastic,
Speaker 1: which attempted to go into damage control mode again. They
Speaker 1: made denials of being an asset flip. They said that
Speaker 1: they'd been working on the title for four years. They
Speaker 1: made kind of a half hearted apology for the marketing,
Speaker 1: saying that maybe the game hadn't been marketed properly. There
Speaker 1: should have been no maybe there, but these measures clearly
Speaker 1: weren't working. They were not modifying the game community at all. Shockingly,
Speaker 1: four days after launching the game into early access, Fantastic
Speaker 1: announced that the company was shutting down because the game
Speaker 1: was not financially successful. Now, this also raised eyebrows because
Speaker 1: it had sold two hundred thousand copies in early access,
Speaker 1: and yes, a lot of people were already requesting refunds.
Speaker 1: But there'd been lots of games that had really rocky launches.
Speaker 1: A Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven springs to mind. That game
Speaker 1: had a terrible launch. There were so many people pointing
Speaker 1: out flaws in the game, and yet the teams behind
Speaker 1: those games would rally and they would address the issue.
Speaker 1: And with Cyberpunk, it became an incredible turnaround. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you've heard about the DLC that came out earlier
Speaker 1: this year, that turned Cyberpunk from a joke where people
Speaker 1: just dismissed the game entirely, saying it's JANKI it turned
Speaker 1: it into a Game of the Year contender, right. That
Speaker 1: is phenomenal. That's incredible dedication in your developer team, and
Speaker 1: it shows what can happen if you really do take
Speaker 1: the incoming criticisms to heart and try to address them.
Speaker 1: But Fantastic would never get that chance. The company focused
Speaker 1: instead on wiping out its online presence, including its YouTube channel,
Speaker 1: its founder's Twitter feed, like it's on website, pretty much
Speaker 1: its entire online existence. Fantastic deleted Mytona. The publisher said
Speaker 1: it will honor refunds for all players who bought the game.
Speaker 1: If you buy a game on Steam, you can request
Speaker 1: a refund, but only if you've not played the game
Speaker 1: for too long. Two hours is the cutoff here. The
Speaker 1: idea is that if you play a game for like
Speaker 1: forty hours and then you ask for a refund, what
Speaker 1: you're doing is you're trying to scam the store and
Speaker 1: get your money back for a game that you have
Speaker 1: thoroughly played. But if you bought a game, you booted
Speaker 1: it up and within an hour or so you realize
Speaker 1: you made a huge mistake, to quote arrested development, you
Speaker 1: can get your money back. But a lot of players
Speaker 1: were in that post two hour group, right, and that
Speaker 1: was largely because of those server issues. It's not like
Speaker 1: they were actively playing the game. The game was running
Speaker 1: and they were trying to play it, but they were
Speaker 1: having trouble connecting to sessions, and so by the time
Speaker 1: they're able to request for a refund, they've already got
Speaker 1: more than two hours of quote unquote game time and
Speaker 1: they would be left out in the cold. But my
Speaker 1: Tona appeared to say that this will not be the case,
Speaker 1: that they will honor all refunds by that time, by
Speaker 1: the time Fantastic was shutting down, nearly half of all
Speaker 1: the people who had bought the day before in early
Speaker 1: Access had already requested a refund. That's terrible. Now, some
Speaker 1: gamers accused the Brothers of trying to take the money
Speaker 1: and run, that the whole thing was a scam from
Speaker 1: top to bottom, that it was never anything more than that.
Speaker 1: I don't have any hard evidence one way or the other,
Speaker 1: but here is my take. I doubt that this was
Speaker 1: an intentional scam. I just don't think it makes much
Speaker 1: sense to be an intentional scam. I think a lot
Speaker 1: of scummy stuff happened, right. I think there were a
Speaker 1: lot of really bad decisions, and those include unpaid labor
Speaker 1: being at the top. I think that's the worst decision,
Speaker 1: But mismarketing the game is another clear one. So yes,
Speaker 1: there were definitely bad decisions that were being done, some
Speaker 1: shady stuff that was going on, But I don't think
Speaker 1: that the ultimate desire was to run a scam. For
Speaker 1: one thing, Steam doesn't pay developers in real time, right.
Speaker 1: If you go on Steam and you buy a copy
Speaker 1: of a game, it's not like Steam then cuts a
Speaker 1: check for the developer and sends it on right then
Speaker 1: and there. In fact, most of the time, we're talking
Speaker 1: about a pretty significant delay, like a delay of a
Speaker 1: month or two between when Steam receives you know, revenue
Speaker 1: from purchases and when it sends that along to the developer.
Speaker 1: So when you've got a delay that's a month or two,
Speaker 1: then you know you can't You're not going to make
Speaker 1: any money by launching a game and then shutting down
Speaker 1: within less than a week. That's just not going to
Speaker 1: work on that sort of time frame. So it's not
Speaker 1: like the Brothers took the money from those two hundred
Speaker 1: thousand initial sales and then said Cus suckers and ran
Speaker 1: off to Cabo or something. That's just not realistic. Instead,
Speaker 1: I think this was a case of a studio tackling
Speaker 1: a project that was just beyond their capability. They overpromised
Speaker 1: and they underdelivered. They did appear to use pre build assets, right,
Speaker 1: but a lot of games do that, and it would
Speaker 1: be unrealistic to expect a small independent developer studio to
Speaker 1: build everything from the ground up in just a couple
Speaker 1: of years. That's just impossible if you look at some
Speaker 1: of the big Triple A titles out there, which obviously
Speaker 1: are built on a much larger scale. Granted, but these
Speaker 1: are companies that spend the better part of the decade
Speaker 1: developing some of their big titles. So I don't think
Speaker 1: it would have been fair to expect a small studio
Speaker 1: to release an ambitious project like this in a year
Speaker 1: or two and not make use of pregenerating assets. I
Speaker 1: just don't think that was possible. I don't think that
Speaker 1: the assets were incorporated very well. I think that the
Speaker 1: gap between what was shown in trailers and what people
Speaker 1: could actually experience when they played the game was way
Speaker 1: too big. I mean, you can watch videos of people
Speaker 1: doing side by side comparisons where the environments don't look
Speaker 1: nearly as good. The lighting is not at all impressive
Speaker 1: compared to the trailers. That's far less occupied by both
Speaker 1: zombies and player characters, so you can run through an
Speaker 1: entire region and not see anyone hardly the same sort
Speaker 1: of high tension kind of experience that the trailers were
Speaker 1: giving off. So that certainly was an issue. And also
Speaker 1: I think, you know, the studio heads changing their minds
Speaker 1: over what needed to be in the game versus not
Speaker 1: in the game. That was a really huge blow to
Speaker 1: the company as well. And yeah, I think they were
Speaker 1: just kind of hoping they could do the fake it
Speaker 1: until you make it philosophy and that eventually things would
Speaker 1: shake out okay, But it didn't. So I think it
Speaker 1: was a project that was mired with terrible decisions. But
Speaker 1: I don't think it was an intentional scam. If it
Speaker 1: in fact was an intentional scam, if that was the
Speaker 1: plan all along, and maybe the brothers just wanted to
Speaker 1: take my Tona's investment into the game and attempt to
Speaker 1: keep as much of that money as possible. Maybe that's
Speaker 1: the case. Maybe that was the case all along. Maybe
Speaker 1: they were just like, let's take the publisher money and run.
Speaker 1: But they didn't do that right away. They stuck around
Speaker 1: and they actually put out a game. It's not like
Speaker 1: the game got canceled, which I would think would be
Speaker 1: more likely if you were trying to scam the publisher. Also,
Speaker 1: with both of those companies having their origins from Siberia,
Speaker 1: I would say that it'd be real risky to pull
Speaker 1: those kind of shenanigans on purpose. So I again I
Speaker 1: think the old adage of you should never attribute something
Speaker 1: to maliciousness when it could go to just incompetence. I'm
Speaker 1: more willing to believe in competence in this case coupled
Speaker 1: with some shady business practices. But yeah, that's my take.
Speaker 1: I don't know anything for sure, but this was a
Speaker 1: really fascinating story that unfolded over the last couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: so I wanted to do an episode about it, and
Speaker 1: I hope that you found it interesting. I also hope
Speaker 1: you are all well, and I will talk to you
Speaker 1: again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For
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