Unangbangkay

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Josh Tolentino | weeaboomer, Gamist
| work: RPG Site, Game Rant, Gamecritics | ex: Siliconera, Destructoid

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Campster
@Campster

So this is absolutely my "words should mean things" pet peeve acting up and I know it's an unpopular opinion, but...

The Day Before came out and four days later the developer announced they were shutting their doors. That sucks for pretty much everyone involved - developers laid off before Christmas, a live service game people bought in early access hoping it'd get better will now sit abandoned,

And everyone, everywhere, seems to be hellbent on using the word "scam" to describe this scenario. And I just... can't get on with that?


That's not to say there isn't some contempt to be had for the developers, especially the leads and executives. Multiple blown deadlines, promises of a full blown MMO cut down to an extraction shooter, and trademark trouble with the title that really should have been sorted out before announcing the project. Their trailers and marketing material famously just aped cool stuff from other people who did it first. Perhaps most egregious is the way they looked to get free labor out of volunteers with the promise that they had a chance at getting a real job if their work was good enough.

And I want to be absolutely clear: all of this is scummy! Asking for unpaid work on a for-profit commercial product is terrible! Lifting the creative work of others in a creative medium is inexcusable! Shuttering your early access game after four days because it became apparent you'd make no money is deeply upsetting and unfair to your customers when it should have been obvious to you there wasn't enough financial runway to support the title! If it isn't clear: fuck these guys for their deeply unethical and utterly incompetent approach to pretty much every facet of game development.

But... is it a scam?

Like, to me a scam is a grift. A swindle. Hoodwinking someone. Selling a false bill of goods and making off with the profits. Knowingly taking undo rewards through behavior that leaves others impoverished. And I'm not sure this qualifies?

The whole affair smacks of an incompetent leadership team that got in way over their heads in every way. That's not to excuse their behavior - people were materially harmed by their actions! But you can see how when leads at the small studio decided "We're gonna make an MMO!!" that that became the seed of their downfall. It's the same mistake that consumed countless small developers in the 2000s. They're the people that made "What if Dead by Daylight had a prop hunt mode?" game Propnight. They're not the people who are about to launch the next big MMO. They have neither the staff nor the financial backing to pull that kind of a project off. And everything that happens after they decide to go down that route is them slowly realizing it in real time - the delays, the lack of funds to run your own marketing so you 'borrow' from others, the free labor, the lack of competent legal coverage, loans forcing them into so much debt they need the game to be an immediate mega-hit out the gate, etc.

But the thing is... there's not really a grift here? There's no one making a profit out the other end, just a bunch of studio heads in ridiculous debt desperate to fix the incredibly stupid situation they've backed themselves into. The game had no preorder sales, so I don't think you can argue they were getting money on just the promises alone. Every copy sold happened while the game's quality was a known factor. The funds earned in December won't be dispersed by Steam until around January 31, so if they really wanted to keep the grift alive in a malicious way they wouldn't have announced the studio closure until much later in the month. Additionally, they didn't just announce their studio closure and keep the money rolling in on Steam - the game is no longer for sale. And they have even announced they're working with Valve to ensure anyone that ones a refund can get one. Like, they released a turd made under extremely unethical conditions, but if their goal was simply to part people from their money they're doing it all wrong. So I don't know why we're calling it a "scam."

I dunno, like I said: I'm not trying to defend these guys. They did some heinous stuff and should absolutely be called to account for it. But I reserve the word "scam" for rug-pulls. Take-the-money-and-run types. Situations where someone's obviously coming out ahead. This just looks like some utterly incompetent boobs got in way, way over their head, ended up in massive debt, started cutting ethical, creative, and managerial corners left and right, and everyone - their employees, their customers, themselves - all ended up hurt by it. It's a mundane evil of incompetence, not a grift, and I feel like we should use words that express that difference.

There's the premeditated malice of a scam, and then there's the clownshow of bad deeds you do and casual harm you cause when you're an unscrupulous and incompetent developer trying to tackle one of the most expensive and complex game genres without the budget or staff to do so, all while up to your eyeballs in debt.


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in reply to @Campster's post:

Honestly unless we know how much it cost them, I don't think we can rule out the scam. 200K sales (only on day one I believe?) with 50% refunds is still 100K sales. It's nothing for the kind of game it was supposed to be, but it's probably 100 times more than tons of GOTY level stuff.

The studio listed other games they made, but when you look at it, none of them seem finished, with review complaining that the devs abandoned the games. They're also listed under slightly different studio names. To me it really sounds like they make a habit of selling games they never intend on finishing and make sure new customers can't look back easily on their track record.
[Edit: HypeTrain Digital said Fntastic abandoned the Wild Eight during early access, hence the developer being someone else on steam]

The difference here is that for some reason (the reason here gamers will gladly believe lies if that's what they want to hear) this one got really popular. So popular than media outlets and influencers talked about it, making it even more popular.
So maybe they tried to actually make it playable after than, hence the delays, but I really don't think it was ever supposed to be complete. And that I'd still call a scam, because that would be the intent.

I hesitate to roll with calling it a scam based on this logic, though, because that narrative makes it sound like they were just a normal, in-over-their-heads gamedev studio that happened to get picked by the heavenly powers of media and influencers to be boosted. If anything this is more an indictment of games media and our consumption of it than of this single studio.

Yeah, 200k sales with 50% refunds is 100k sales, but that 100k sales gets more complicated than that. First, we can crunch that down to 70k sales because of Valve's 30% cut. A cursory amount of research shows that Russia has a 15.% to 20% business tax rate, and that may or may not include refunds. This doesn't even get into things like federal sales taxes, because that's also a part of releasing on Steam. A cursory glance shows that a 20% VAT is probably the most applicable, and that's going to probably be applied per sale.

There's also the part where this is a studio that had actual employees. Fntastic had about 60 employees, like paid employees being tracked for tax purposes, and odds are them continuing to get paid at all, along with all the other business expenses, hinge on a game that now made the equivalent of maybe the equivalent 30k sales and is one of the highest profile flops in ages. These are just the most cursory numbers too.

This is the most charitable interpretation. This doesn't include things like "were they in debt?" which is a very real possibility, especially given how aggressively they were trying to not pay people during development.

a scam you fuck up, get called out on and have to backpeddle on is still a scam, chris... Just because it isn't a single instance of cut-and-dry scamming and is instead a mess doesn't make it less of a scam, or more appropriately, several poorly run scams.

Okay but I still don't see the scam. Like, this isn't some pop-up new studio that only existed as an LLC on paper looking to grift - they had already released Propnight, which was relatively well received. The Day Before was then announced in January of 2021 and didn't see the light until December 2023. So if it is a scam they were playing the long con. But they did release a functional title, even if it stunk and was bad and didn't live up to their unrealistic marketing. And then they took it offline and are trying to work out refunds for anyone who wants one.

I just don't see the grift. Like, where's the backpeddle? Where's the hoodwinking and the getaway plan? What's the version of this scam that "works" look like?

Because I don't think there is a scam, here.

i think this is a really interesting point when looking at the crypto world, which is full of scams and not-quite scams. one thought i've had is that a natural failure state of a financial scheme is to end up as a ponzi - the logic is maybe if we just dip into customer funds a little bit it will tide us over until we make a good trade and are in the black again. at the end, the money's gone. this was basically the madoff scheme as i understand it as well

did they set out to rip people off? not always, i do think some of these people believed they were legitimate at the outset at least. did they end up ripping people off in a way that's basically the same as a ponzi scheme, a classic scam? yes. it was certainly fraud, was it a scam? not sure

similarly a struggling game studio launching an unfinished flop looks like a rugpull, but it's not really the whole story. at least in this case they didn't walk away with or otherwise burn a bunch of other people's money, which goes a long way toward making it not really qualify as a scam to me

anyway thanks for prompting some interesting thinking

well, what i'm saying is that the intent from the outset wasn't fraud, but at some point the decision to commit fraud was made.

is it useful to say the whole thing was a scam if the fraud started halfway? is it useful to draw a distinction between fraud from the outset and fraud later on? is one a scam and the other a different sort of fraud?

Ponzi schemes are a poor comparison point; the point of a ponzi scheme is to grow by creating the illusion of returns, paying the new incoming money to old investors to draw in even more newcomers.

In this case, all they did was promise a great game, deliver a poor game, and 200k people bought it either too fast for reviews to come in or without even checking the reviews. The only reason this isn't just a bunch of people looking at a broken hammer, buying it, and then complaining that it's broken, is because you can't see the game itself until after purchasing, only the screenshots and videos and reviews.

In this sense, it is indistinguishable from earnestly trying to make the game they were advertising (which is normal! every games company markets more of a game than what they've got on hand at the moment) and the danger of classifying it as fraud or a scam is precisely because of the chilling effect it has on anyone else who wants to try making a game; now failure doesn't simply mean you release a bad game, it means you're marked as a scammer and a fraud. When there's no space for failure all that will be left are huge corporate gamedevs who can take the reputational hit or afford to cancel and not release a game years into development.

yes, that's a description of a ponzi scheme! it just turns out one way to become a ponzi scheme is to earnestly set out to manage people's money, promising good returns, then fail to generate those returns and string along your customers, hoping for a turn in the tides.

i'm not trying to argue that this game is a scam, i don't think it is. i'm noting that, if one of the arguments for why it's not a scam is "they meant well at the outset but things got away from them", that argument also might also excuse things we'd generally be more comfortable calling a scam. which is interesting!

personally i'd say that rather than worrying about the earnestness of the effort, this game isn't a scam because as far as i know they didn't actually take people's money on false pretenses - you could just look at early reviews and see that maybe it's not what they originally promised. breaking promises isn't a scam, even if it feels bad. modern gamer hype culture is generally a bad thing, for exactly this reason - it generates a mob on the basis of disappointment, which is ridiculous.

It feels like a rugpull without the final step. Best case (also occam's razor probably what actually happened), the Fntastic leadership were that delusional and were biting way off more than they could chew. That meme of a small group of industry "vets" building a dream MMO on r/gamedevclassifieds. They had a publisher(Mytona) that made casual titles, stuff that appears on my Kindle's ad screen. In a rug pull, they usually try to run away with the money, but instead the publisher is trying to give out refunds. I wonder if they were expecting an Early Access miracle or something. It feels like they were trying to build a narrative of a scrappy studio punching above their weight class, but with our current daily inundation of scams in our communications, as well as other early access mishaps, it just seems people were more willing to just point at a failing game and call fraud.

I'd argue, as someone who bought it, that propnite was an instance of deceit since their communication with players in the early days of its release was "don't worry, don't worry, we're going to fix things and add more content" and after enough time had passed that everyone forgot about it, they started promoting TDB

for all we know, the intent for TDB was to meet the bare minimum-viable-product expectation and drop it all the same, the only difference being that they realized even that was overscoped and cobbled something vaguely game-shaped from what they had

like others have said, just because it failed doesn't mean there wasn't dishonesty about what the ultimate intentions were. I read their subsequent choices as an attempt to hide that a grift attempt was made

The language erosion around "scam" started happening around 10 years ago, afaict Steam forums and 4chan were the main ferments for it. And oh hey it was in full swing by gamergate, I'm sure that's totally unrelated.

There is a practically infinite number of ways a given game development process can become a complete disaster, some of which do involve bad faith on the developer's part, but I have never heard of a single actual scam where the developers had zero intention of ever making a game and just wanted to rip people off and escape (how, exactly?) with their money. I'm sure the web3/nft nonsense did have some actual cases of that but none of those people called themselves game developers or thought of what they did as game dev.

It fuckin sucks, words mean things, participating in that mis-usage makes everything worse for everyone.

Anyone in the replies here who is feeling all high and mighty about this shit should try releasing a game sometime and getting utterly fucked over by various factors (your employer, your publisher, your own lack of experience, the indifference of the market, the list goes on) and see how it feels to get called "scammer" by your rhetorical peers.

and then it alllll blurs together horribly since there's a whole cottage industry in helping people who suck earnestly and with their whole ass pivot to selling $50 tshirts when their life collapses as a result of how much they suck

It honestly sounds like a classic overpromise/underdeliver scenario, except it was a studio that couldn't take financial hit it needed to survive. Like, this isn't even unique in or to games, it happens on products and with companies all the time.

does a scam necessitate malicious intent? I could believe that, based on the studio's previous behavior, that this is just a case of leadership who, at worst, have an extreme disconnect with reality and are not actively seeking to defraud anyone

but I don't think that ultimately matters. there wasn't an attempt to reach out and say "hey, the previous videos we released were effectively concepts that we wanted to aim for, but the scope changed and we've dialed down what the game is". it's still a game that was sold under the pretense that it was the thing that was originally shown

add to that, there's too many unknowns in all this and even giving benefit of the doubt based on what the team has publicly stated about their budget constraints is putting trust in someone who has not acted in good faith throughout this. for all we know, this thing could have been thrown together ages ago and the time inbetween was just to wait for the apprehension to die down

there's too little precedent for this kind of thing (you've gotta admit it's very bizarre to turn around and say the thing is fucked that quickly) and too little reliable information to work off of. all we really have is a first published draft that is very distinctly not what it was suggested to be. even if it's ultimately a failure, "scam" is the only language I can use to describe it

(you've gotta admit it's very bizarre to turn around and say the thing is fucked that quickly)

so like... not really? in fact, this is extremely common in early access releases, you just don't really tend to hear that it happened. if you spend any amount of time in the indie mmo space, you'll see that a shocking lot of them get released and then that's it. you never hear from any of them ever again. socials go dark, eventually their domain goes down, the game ceases to let people log in at all after a week

the only reason you see this happening more publicly now is probably because all eyes were on the studio. if they went dark, they'd be in a pretty bad spot, more than they are now going "yeah we're out, seeya"

that's the thing, I've seen plenty of those over the years (hell, I was on a dev team for a while on a game that never even got released). the difference I've seen is that there's usually some sign that the decision made sense given their circumstances and/or was at least part of a good faith effort to deliver some part of what was promised

I think back to spacebase DF9, which did have a similar backlash at the time, but they made a legitimate case for why they were doing it given their history and present situation. it still represented a template of a good faith effort

if this dev was trying to avoid heat, then why release the thing at all? just shitcan it at that point and fade into obscurity along with countless other vaporware. I agree with you on the fact that they couldn't wait out the negative reception on this one, because that's historically what they've done on past releases and could get away with since they were much lower visibility (speaking as someone who made the mistake of buying propnite)

I don't think what I'm saying has been really conveyed. a lot of them release and then literally never get updates. I'm saying there's a whole host of them that come out and then immediately go dark and you'll see them not have login servers in less than a month. there is no sign of a decision, the game just stops

"if this dev was trying to avoid heat, then why release the thing at all?"
so here's the thing: they didn't know this was the level of heat they were going to get until after release. they've seen a 50% refund request rate, which is almost unheard of at this scale. that's "crater a studio" levels of bad unless you have cdpr levels of cash. and even if they did know, depending on their financials, releasing anything at all will be better than just trying to eat the loss

this is a story that's much more complicated than a scam, but also much more common. the only real notable thing here is the level of attention it was getting before release

in many of those scenarios though, there just isn't enough information around them to make an educated guess of what the intent was

I'm arguing that, based on what this particular dev has done in the past, there's reason to believe that they weren't going into this with honest intentions. maybe that's me being sour over having been previously burned by them, but it's at least indicative of a pattern

unreliability is usually accompanied by some forwardness about what went wrong. being dishonest about how you plan to support a game, and then exhibiting similar dishonesty about how you advertise your next project represents a pattern of malicious behavior

someone can do something malicious through poor judgment rather than outright nefarious intent. at that point, it's a distinction without a difference

"unreliability is usually accompanied by some forwardness about what went wrong"

since when? this is just outright untrue most of the time. a lot of unreliability is just not being reliable, not anything more than that. trying to paint this as malice is increasingly absurd and you've even mentioned how there's an emotional component of your own attached this

there's no actual evidence of nefarious intent here, just a company that isn't very good

making a gameplay trailer followed by releasing a game with very little mechanical or feature resemblance, all without communicating why that change in scope happened is the definition of dishonesty to me, but alright. guess it's absurd to call that malicious behavior

I agree. It's a bad game, but it's not a scam. Promises were broken, but an actual product was delivered. Just really poorly executed. The main argument in favor of calling it a scam is that the marketing was deceptive. But, like, marketing is gonna marketing!

I think people ARE making a judgment call when they say it's a scam. It wasn't a scam by the people working on the game directly, but by the owners of the company. Obviously it's not entirely clear to us on the outside what happened with all the money that was generated by those sales, but it's an easy call to make to say "well someone probably just made off with it".

You can disagree with that call, but they're using the word correctly.

But no money has even been made yet!

Steam doesn't pay out until 30 days after the end of the previous month. Whatever money the game earned in the four days it was available won't be distributed to Fntastic (or let's be honest, Fntastic's creditors) until the end of January. And they're trying to open refunds up such that anyone who wants one can get one now, before the pay period has even ended, let alone before they get paid themselves.

Like, there's this idea that there's a team of mustache twirling executives absconding into the night with bags that have dollars signs printed on them, and the facts just don't bare that out.

Executives are terrified of lawsuits, because it interferes with their scam! I am being a little sarcastic, but not entirely. The executive scam is always, in my opinion, to tell as few people as possible the whole truth, whether those people are inside or outside the company, and cash out as well as possible for themselves and any shareholders. This absolutely, repeatedly, includes telling no one inside and out fucking shit about anything until ship dat of a product and then throwing everyone under the bus.

I admit that it is good for developer resumes that the game shipped at all, but you don't go "oh, no" and close a company overnight. This would have been known and gamed out (in the loosest definition of the phrase) months ahead of time.

I doubt leads knew. Maybe some upper non-execs had some inkling. There are a few exceptions, but most executives will lie to your face for months if not years once shareholders are involved. They may be following the letter of laws (again, lawsuits causing issues), but following the mere letter while riding your exit strategy out still makes you a piece of shit, imo. So, sure, let's call it a scam. Many worse words could likely apply.

absolutely fascinated by the number of people in these comments down here who are very convinced that this is a scam because uh

checks notes

because the developer overpromised, historically made buggy/unfinished games, made games and then didn't meaningfully support them post-launch, and are pulling the plug immediately after a botched launch

that could describe literally half of the aaa and aa game studio space. starbreeze, ubisoft, rockstar, ea, boss key productions

this feels really really really like it's just a vibes based upset with no real grounding.