MassivelyOP’s 2023 Golden Yachties: The Everyone Saw That Coming award

December 31, 2023 4:00 PM

Welcome back to MassivelyOP’s not-so-serious end-of-the-year awards as we present the Everyone Saw That Coming award. Yes, it’s the Golden Yachties series, named in honor of those bright sparks absolutely convinced that video game blogging is a lucrative career and we’re all sailing ’round the world on ships of gold. (Stay in school, kids.)

And the winner is…

THE DAY BEFORE’S IMPLOSION

The Day Before lit itself on fire after our regular awards were already in, so we decided to honor it our way: with a Golden Yachtie.

When mainstream gamers started losing their minds over The Day Before at the beginning of the year, I was not impressed; we had covered the game’s announcement back in 2021, and it looked exactly like a million other post-apoc zombie survivalboxes overpromising the usual destined-to-be-cut-before-release fluff features. It was the kind of game MMORPG players have been making fun of since at least the days of H1Z1, and I had honestly forgotten it existed.

So when the dev studio behind it abruptly delayed the game over a supposed trademark dispute the very day it was meant to deliver a launch trailer, we – and our readers – were immediately skeptical. I mean, we were literally catching these folks in outright lies as long ago as January, and the rest of the year wasn’t much better as they continued fibbing about their sandbox bona fides. And friends, if a dev studio ever comes out hours before early access launch and – without prompting – declares it’s not a scam… it’s probably a scam.

Our readers weren’t fooled for even a minute. It comes with the territory of online games, and this sucker had everything: shady overseas studios, weird legal disputes, dodgy interviews, dev fibbing, hardcore edgelord vibes, asset flipping, tired old tropish genres, Dawn-like levels of promising features far beyond an indie’s resources, and on and on. Everyone saw the rugpull coming a mile away. Just sit back and watch.