However badly managed The Day Before may have looked upon its disastrous early access release, the reality was reportedly much worse than anyone could have imagined. Anonymous Fntastic devs and employees of publisher Mytona reporting to German gaming sites Game Two and GameStar have told an astonishing tale of blatant mismanagement, galling mistreatment, and an overall workplace summarized as “pure, megalomaniacal chaos.”
Among the mismanagement accusations leveraged against Fntastic founders the Gotovtsev brothers are shifts in scope and style whenever the two played the latest big release, such as character creation changing multiple times over after the duo spent time in GTA Online, Hogwarts Legacy, and Baldur’s Gate 3, along with a dramatically altered appearance to the game’s setting after the brothers played Spider-Man 2. One developer even claims that he or she wasn’t aware they were working on an MMO until they watched one of TDB’s trailers.
On top of this, workers at Fntastic suffered astonishing levels of mistreatment: Allegations from former employees include a volunteer workforce drawn from young, inexperienced, and generally desperate game devs; voluntary unpaid overtime to the point where one dev reportedly was begging for a break to get a shower and a meal; an apparently constant threat of random firings; and devs being made to pay fines as high as over $1,900 for turning in shoddy work.
To put a cherry on the top of this sundae of alleged awfulness, developers apparently don’t even know where the Gotovtsev brothers are: The two reportedly disappeared from contact at around the time of TDB’s early access launch, resurfacing only long enough to shutter the studio via Microsoft Teams. Sources believe that the brothers have gone on to make a new mobile games studio, but it’s unclear what studio that may be.
Readers might remember that Fntastic put out a baffling statement last week that tried to push back against what it characterized as a hate and misinformation campaign, including claims that it treated its employees well and even paid for hardware and mortgages, but considering these multiple new revelations, it may be easy to draw some opposing conclusions.
