The 'Day Before' devs are back...

so they are back the studio behind the day before the previously most wishlisted game on all of steam that released two horrible reviews basically just wasn't even a game and was shut down 4 days after it initially dropped they tucked their tail between their legs ran off shut the game down everything like that and we thought that was the end of it but they have just returned and are asking for more money after mons and months of Silence they posted to Twitter with a link to a new website when you click on it you get

all of these prompts FAQ all of this stuff primarily this one everyone deserves a second chance with a link to a plan if you're not overly scared of Trojans and other such malware you can click download PDF open it up and look at what they have and it's a massive weirdly formatted thing I don't even know what aspect ratio this is but if you scroll all the way down you can see they have new pillars principles upon which their company will be founded now firstly honesty they're not going to lie to you that again you

would assume would be like a given but whatever transparency we understand the mistakes in absence of past Communications blah blah blah whatever they're going to talk on Discord they're going to like report on development progress whatever professionalism this is a big one we are transitioning from a volunteer-driven approach to one firmly rooted in professionalism that's right this time around their employees are going to be employees allegedly not just volunteers which is what it was before it was a team of volunteers making a game that they were charging for how that makes any sense I don't

know like who was getting the money not the employees cuz there weren't employees they were volunteers not getting paid the whole thing was bizarre they go on raise development standards expand professionalism again enhance brand identity focusing on rebranding the uh fantastic studio name which is what they're named I I just the gall like the gumption to release a straightup scam in the form of the day before it was a game that was just asset flips didn't have gameplay didn't have really anything going for it it was a scam full full force no other explanation thankfully

after steam stepped in and started being fairly upset about it justifiably so they flipped on their previous statements offered refunds shut the game down and moved on likely because they were having to pay for server infrastructure that they didn't want to have to pay for so they just decided to cut their losses and run but now they're back and they're saying that they deserve a second chance and if you choose to take action by clicking on that button you see a mentioned Kickstarter campaign if you hit let's go it takes you over to this one

somehow they've raised $9,800 earlier when we were looking at this on my live stream over on Luke Stevens live or on Twitch at Luke stens TV we were looking at this and they hadn't raised 500 bucks yet so somehow in just an addition add few backers they've gone up to just under $10,000 I don't know how that's possible again it seems to me like there might be something fishy going on but I will let uh I will let the more capable investigators figure it out but basically this is the game that they are working on

it is a game where you play kind of like fall guys with a bunch of party members and Co-op and you platform and work your way through levels in physics-based Co-op fun cool it's at least it looks like a game uh how unique or or original it is I don't know but it's at least a game it seems and to their credit they actually launched this with a demo now I being one that likes to play miserable Games For Your Entertainment decided to download the demo myself and I have it running right here as you

can see Escape Factory demo if I turn on the sound let's see what we got okay okay we click it Escape Factory demo fantastic whatever uh you can see we've got little guys running around okay options do we have uh resolution modes ooh fancy let's let's just crank this like crazy let's go hi hi oh it's locked up oh God hi anti-aliasing sure why not and then let's go back and there it is so it's an actual ual game it seems right cool now if you're like me immediately you are suspicious that this is perhaps

another asset flip which if you don't know what the term asset flip refers to it's basically the practice of some let's say shortcut taking developers where they go onto platforms like the Unreal Engine store the unity asset store or Turbo squid or another website that offers assets 3D 2D whatever and they purchase those assets or download them for free and then put them into games that they charge money for and they're called asset flips because they just take the assets quickly flip them into a game sell that to people get a little bit of cash

and move on to the next flip and just do that over and over and over again if they sell 10 copies or 20 copies of one of these asset flips they can still make money because it takes them so little time to throw these things together this initially seems promising because it's like oh they are telling us this is a new Fantastic this is fantastic 2.0 we're not going to do the same thing we did with the day before where we just took assets from those stores flipped them into a game and didn't do anything

with them we're actually developing games now well there's a little bit of an issue uh because somebody went on and started digging through the code these people are known as data Miners and found that uh this no surprise this is another asset flip shocker I know as you can see ocular malice says looks like fantastic HQ deleted my post on Steam forums about the assets they stuffed into Escape Factory luckily I st Dash to copy on the way back machine here's the archived thread and if you pull up that archived thread before it was deleted

seemingly by fantastic you can see right here a list of the things that they have taken and flipped the networking codebase is taken from the free multiplayer like sample code that you can just download for free other things like the cat studio lava map the shapes FX third person controller uni VFX fantasy Sky boox pixel Sky demo background pack it's the demo pack as well all of these things have been taken and flipped into this now listen for some of this I don't want to be unreasonable if there is like a set of code that's

been provided for free to the community like I don't blame developers like fantastic for using that where we run into trouble is when you're using assets like this which granted presumably they've paid 45 bucks to license it you know they've done what they needed to do they've paid for the license the problem is when they are making it out like this is not the same thing as the day before they're pretending as though they have totally changed and they're not just flipping assets quickly for a quick Buck rather they are allegedly developing something from scratch

to sell to people and they've learned their lesson they're not going to do asset flips anymore but that's demonstrably not the case but you know what let's try it let's just make a a server and let's boot into it and here we are in the little game you you see we got little like I guess waiting room I guess is what this is I'm guessing all of these assets will also be discovered to be taken from one of these stores but let's actually I need a minimum of four players okay I can't oh an enter

is broken it's it's broken okay you can't okay I don't know what to do I can't there okay I guess I'm going to have to alt four out of this it's already broken you can't make this up okay we'll boot back in let's see if we can join a server maybe we can find one there play server names refresh are refresh nope nope they're just they just aren't servers it's just it's just busted let's try let's try this again let's just go here new server we go here tab player list okay we have emote okay

I'm guessing that's also just copy and pasted from somewhere Z for an ability that doesn't do anything okay F to interact can I interact with the ball nope and then if I try to hit enter now enter Works to close it it's just super super buggy okay well that's the demo so listen fantastic I understand the desire to make like a comeback and to win people over I get the sentiment of everybody just deserves a second chance I get all of that but listen you straight up scammed people a few months ago like not even

that long ago I think it was December of last year you know 9 months ago and then you disappear and you come back asking for more money that is so insane I don't even know if this is real life anymore I don't know who is giving you money like you can see they have teers all the way up to 12,000 and allegedly there's one person who has pledged this amount and one of the rewards for pledging 12,000 I guess Singaporean dollars which is about 9,300 USD one of the rewards for that is getting to go

and have dinner specifically an unforgettable dinner with the founders of the studio who knows maybe this is somebody making a YouTube video maybe this is like mudahar and he's he's prepping to do a big expose that would be fantastic if that's what happening I still don't know why anybody would give that much money but if I had to put my own money on this I would guess that this is probably somebody within fantastic or their publisher that is doing this just to generate some hype and make it feel as though something is happening because if

you subtract that $9,300 from the total they've raised they're still at about 500 bucks which is what they were at a handful of hours ago when I was looking at this on stream they have gotten a few more pledges but almost all of this is from one person about 95% of it is from one person and I I would not be surprised if it turns out that their uh their credit card info doesn't actually work let's just say that and this brings me to my main point of this video which is just fantastic you just

scammed people like N9 months ago okay you just did that you are not entitled to anybody's money and frankly asking for money after all of that is another level of ballsy like it is unbelievable unconscionable uncons whatever the word is to do that it's shocking it's shocking I I cannot believe it what you need to do is win people back based on the quality of your work even now you're building a demo which is filled with assets that have been flipped off of the unity store some of which are free others are demo packs others

are just publicly available open source code which is not like an unforgivable sin those assets are there for you to purchase for a reason we get it the reason it's a problem for you is because you have demonstrated time and time again especially with your full release 9 months ago that you are incapable of putting together a product yourself and you're claiming that this is fantastic 2.0 and that this is the big moment where you're going to change and prove everybody wrong but you're doing the same thing as you were before while pretending that you're

not you're just going to scam people like I this is not that complicated I I am shocked that anybody body would give them any money period but uh while I don't think that that $9,500 contribution is real I'm guessing that's with like a stolen credit card or something I'm still baffled that they could get even 25 people to pitch in roughly 500 bucks alog together for this project it's it's really stunning and frankly you know if they put together a really good game and this ends up being awesome cool I'll be I'll be happy to

see it but I think we all know that that's probably not going to happen we know that this is probably just going to be another asset flip that's going to be dumped into the the pit of steam and quickly forgotten but they're opening it up to stretch goals all the way to close to a million bucks I mean that's pretty ballsy I'm I'm impressed I'm impressed I wouldn't be this confident after the day before but wow so at the end of this don't give them money uh they're just doing the same thing over again I

cannot believe they are but they are are I guess they're just hoping that some people are stupid enough to give them money again I I don't know I don't know what I think happened with the day before the only reason they took it off the store is because allegedly my understanding and and developers feel free to correct me but my understanding is that when you buy something on Steam for let's just say 70 bucks okay so you bought this thing for 70 bucks boom we bought it what happens when you do that is steam takes

their 30% cut right so steam has taken this chunk for themselves but if you issue a refund request steam keeps their 30% cut right so the company made this much money off of it but now when they refund you they have to refund the full amount including steam's cut because steam did their part of the job I mean steam they they sold your game for 30 bucks and distributed it it's not their fault that your game wasn't of a high enough quality that people wanted to return it so steam takes that cut and the studio

now is losing this much effectively on every single return which is why steam returns really really hurt the publisher and the studio behind it because yeah they gave you this money back but they're losing this much money on top of it and once those refund requests started coming in I think they panicked and they just took the game off of the store because whatever money they were bringing in from initial purchases they were losing from those refund requests so they just decided to bail and I forgot about this but it was listed at 40 bucks

at the outset I mean that is insane so every single time they were selling a copy and then having a refund they were losing like 10 12 bucks no wonder they shut shut it down and like bailed on it quickly cuz they were just hemorrhaging money but this is why it's important to remember that they didn't like learn their lesson from the day before for they just got caught and now they're trying to come back and do it all over again and the only reason I think they're not changing their Studio name and they're not

just trying to cover it up is because fantastic has name recognition even now like this video is offering this demo and this Kickstarter some level of publicity not good publicity I'm telling you not to give them any money but still they might consider that to be worth more than just putting something out under an unknown title or unknown Studio whether that's a good idea or not I don't know I don't think this is going to be funded and the way this Kickstarter works is if it's not funded fully they don't take any money from it

but still it's it's just shockingly shockingly ballsy I am I'm still in awe so I guess at the end of all this we should just take away that scammers will always scam and they'll change their tactics they will try to convince you and scream at you pleading for forgiveness and a second chance because they swear they're different and doing things differently this time all the while they're just planning on taking your wallet and pickpocketing you for all of your worth uh because that's just what they do so don't give them the time of day don't

give them any money for the love of God um but I think that this is a good story to just remind you that these people are still out there and there's a lot of other companies doing similar stuff and other devs doing similar stuff that are not as recognizable as fantastic so just be cautious look at Steam Reviews and uh if you're going to buy one of these games probably do it through a steam so you can refund it if it is in fact uh just a crappy asset flip but uh stay safe out there

cuz you never know what somebody's trying to slip past you but with all that said thank you for watching I love you all desperately again don't give them money for the love of God donate it to charity or buy a coffee or something CU at least then it it like is something instead of this but anyway thank you for watching like the video If you enjoyed it subscribe blah blah blah You' heard it all before from every other YouTuber on the planet I'm just glad you're here much love I'll see you in the next one

hugs and kisses bye-bye