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.