You say that, but think about how many gamers have thighs pulling the wool over them so hard that they're becoming mummified. I help work on a project that has some elements which appeal to a very specific subset of people. I've seen em.
I just genuinely don't understand what made people go so crazy over this game, especially considering how little we got to see of it over the years it was supposedly in development for.
I'm amazed that anyone gets excited about (alleged!) open world zombie survival games anymore. That well has been so well and truly tapped that I immediately tune out whenever I hear it... probably why I only started hearing about this game after it finally collapsed
Honestly? People go gaga over open world games despite 99% of them being bad. "This one will be the dayz killer!" "This will be better than botw!" People want to be lied to sadly.
I think a lot of people see a framework and fill in the gaps with what they want to see. its easy to get hyped about something that you know nothing about because you make it what you want to be in your head.
"Takes more than thicc thighs to pull the wool over my eyes." Frost really is the greatest wordsmith of our time. Rule of thumb: If there's no unscripted gameplay footage in any of the trailers, it's going to be bad. Honestly, I'm surprised this got as much hype as it did, zombie shooters are pretty dime a dozen nowadays. Of course, this is less of a zombie shooter, and more of a post apocalyptic walking simulator where you barely use your gun. Not surprised it turned out to be a big scam.
But at the same time if it is scripted we know it’s just for show to build up hype and pre orders and most games know it’s not in the final product/ does not represent the final product cause it is still in development. I mean look at Ubisoft they are known for their downgrades with previous games.
Honestly the most unbelievable part of all this is that The Day Before was the most-wishlisted game on Steam. There are so, so many online competitive co-op/pvp open world zombie shooters with crafting and survival elements. My Steam queue is flooded with them every time there's a sale. How can that market not be well past its saturation point? Are all the fans of the genre just shambling from one title to the next like some sort of mass herd?
I would've thought Silksong or something triple A (or maybe more recently Hades 2). But competitive online multiplayer gamers are a different breed, and their market trends are quite different.
Thanks to bots, stolen/hacked/sold accounts, and stupid humans, how the modern internet can be gamed, cannot be understated. Skepticism is important for navigating the webs. Hone it, feed it, and ingest healthy doses of it.
@@grindtoothmedia120 It was "most wishlisted" before I first heard of it. That set off a few alarm bells by itself. Especially when you look at what else was on that list. More wishlisted than *Silksong* and freakin' Hades 2? I can believe it was skulduggery that put it there. It didn't make them not actually do any dev work until the last couple years. That part's weird no matter what. But I look at the ingredients. Half of the games weren't refunded. So, there was a transfer of money, and a veneer of a shitty game to cover for it. There's a publisher with a company town in Russia. There's a very real possibility the wishlisting was bot activity. Russia's got serious sanctions and botnets out the ass. I think... this wasn't anybody's plan A. I think... I think putting this on the top of the wishlist was a joke or a test of reach. But then, being at the top of the list got the game a lot more attention before people sorta moved on. And then the war started, and Russia got sanctions out the ass. Like I said, it's not plan A, I think this is lemonade made out of extra lemons. But... those involved knew before the 7th that this was going to happen, and did it anyway. The publisher has made no statements about suing the devs... so they don't view it as malfeasance (or, yanno, can't do that without the devs confessing to a lot more, potentially). But also, this doesn't have to relate to the Russian intelligence community in any official capacity. It could have turned into a way to get a lot of money out of a lot of stolen credit cards. I just... don't know how much gets eaten by processing fees from the refunds. That might tank the hell out of the whole theory.
To call this game a fiasco would be an understatement. Props for covering it though. Scams like this should be archived as a warning that something like this could happen again, and should serve as a reminder to us gamers to not fall for this and be smart with our money.
@@MysteriousStranger50 If it counts for anything, I never preordered another game after No Man's Sky. It was a harsh lesson, but I did learn from it. Then again, one drop does not make an ocean.
Wait, how are there still defenders of this game to the point where Nick had to actually debate them? Are people so blind to obvious scams, even after the jig is up? 💀
I was having the same fight with people over Stalker 2. That's definitely a real game, but some of the early trailers definitely looked too good to be true, and I got yelled at over telling people to keep their expectations in check on that one too haha.
I quite like the parallels between the Day Before, and the game that outsold it that came out the same day, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. Owlcat Games and Fntastic are pretty similar studios, Owlcat even being 2 years younger than Fntastic (Founded in 2017 vs 2015) and they both started out with a kickstarted game. However, Owlcat has released 3 major games since it was founded, all extremely well-recieved. The Development of Rogue Trader was done transparently, and as a result has been fantastically successful. We knew what the game actually was for years, and it was more successful despite never being shown off on IGN or Gamespot. It shows the stark differences between people who know what they're doing and people who don't.
While Owlcat is undoubtedly more skilled and more successful than Fntastic, I feel I do have to mention that Owlcat has never released a game that was completed and fully playable at launch. Even Rogue Trader, their most polished game to date, falls apart after the first few acts with loads of bugs and broken quests.
@@Nayenezgani Hell, this year's GOTY - Baldur's Gate 3, has a rather disappointing third act, the game overall being in a state of jank all the way through to 1.0, from what I've heard. Getting a big RPG simply working and polished enough to see the surface of seems like high expectations as is. It's like a curse of the genre.
@@thosebloodybadgers8499I've actually compared Rogue Trader and BG3 a few times on the "third act collapse" problem, since both had early access/beta periods where "playtesters" (a term I use loosely because of my next words) didn't have access to the final act/chapters of content. Which means that those areas didn't get the beta treatment and no one could reasonably raise the alarm that if this is released now, the wheels will fall off as soon as players reach Act 3/Chapter 4. If I had a nickle... etc etc. BG3 had a much longer time in Early Access than Rogue Trader had in beta, yet both have a similar problem--it leaves me wondering if there's a problem with how companies think about playtesting RPGs and other narrative-heavy games.
Bro, the raspy, smokey, noir voice your using, combined with the dragnet/cold case files/unsolved mysteries structure of this video is absolutely blowing me away. Great work!
I can't get enough of these deep dives into issues in the gaming community, and I really admire how Frost can lay out the facts and describe all the conspiracies without committing to any of them. It's hard to separate these things as an outsider, and now I feel like I can actually discuss it without being completely lost.
@@RobstafarianI could argue that the review itself is why gaming has such a bad reputation. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but Sterling was dismissive and combative in their defense, arrogant and holier-than-thou. I disagree with hatred or vitriol against Sterling and CERTAINLY with the DDOS attack, but Sterling was not innocent and everyone knows it. Sterling was trying to provoke a response and they succeeded, good for them, and I wish them well in their future endeavors which I will casually ignore. I also respect anyone that chose to follow them, of course! There's more than enough room to choose to whom we give our attention.
@@Robstafarian I'd never heard of Sterling before the controversy and haven't thought of Sterling since, so I had no bias for or against Sterling. I heard about the controversy, saw for myself the review and follow-up, and I believe Sterling was trolling. You don't. That's fair, I'm not trying to convince you otherwise, but the gripes Sterling had don't warrant a 7/10 final review for me.
Now we need Yahtzee making a "Let's all laugh at the industry that never learns anything teeheehee" lookalike for Second Wind. This one, alongside Redfall and other fiascos deserve it.
@@luizpanigassi no i mean, even back during The Escapist era, i think cold takes was supposed to replace the occasional guide to retarded/special moments in gaming history. though tbf, a variant of those kind of vids has yet to show up on fully ramblomatic, so maybe? but considering this and some of the stuff that was on the escapist version. i think it was basically turned into cold take. though i guess another thing that could've also replaced the occasional guide to retarded/special moments in gaming history is Extra Punctuation/Semi-Ramblomatic. which is voiced by yahtzee and is a side series that tag alongs with ZP/FR respectively. i'll be surprised if i see something like the occasional guide to retarded/special moments in gaming history in a FR episode, but there are already like two things that does similar jobs to it: one, while being voiced by someone who isnt yahtzee, is far more simillar to the OG(R/S)MGH MO; and EP/SR, which is voiced by yahtzee, but doesnt really cover the stuff you would find in a OG(R/S)MGH video.
The whole "The Day Before" really drives him the fact that gamers out there want that "The Division" experience. See, The Division had something that many people wanted in that game, but it was bogged down by its RPG elements that were added, i.e., the rarity system. So... if some group of folks want to make a semi-arcade, extraction/survival shooter, there is money to be made there.
The weirdest thing for me is that I never even heard of this game until it released and everyone started calling it a scam. And I’m on top of all kinds of gaming news
This was called out by some smaller youtbers as soon as the original 'gameplay' video came out. I've been following this fiasco for about a year on a couple of channels so info was definitely out there well before the disaster of a launch.
So glad to see this video is accurate unlike so much reporting on this situation. Countless commentators and UA-camrs are claiming the investors are profiting off this disaster and it was planned to fail from the start. That’s obviously not how any of this works. Not that there aren’t people, and industry practices to blame, but this is the first video I’ve seen actually bother to research the situation beyond what their vibes are telling them.
That's the Internet for you. They'll latch onto the biggest news story and scream it as loud as they can to get views. It's happened with recent UA-cam controversies too. Once the internet grabs hold of an opinion they are not letting go, regardless of future facts or developments. This game didn't even get a chance to improve or allow info to come out about what actually happened. A lot of the Internet will now believe it was a planned scam. I'm glad Cold Take did a deeper dive instead of screaming about it being a scam.
My take on it was that the developers were a startup that had a vision for a game that they did not have the skills to make and could not afford to hire those that had said skills. And all the delay tactics were used because they kept thinking if they had more time, they could make it work. But the truth was that it couldn't work because they did not have the necessary skills to do it in the first place. I remember having friends that worked for a start-up and all the random bullshit that the owners made her do. Like she was supposed to be the social media manager but they had her learning code so she could maintain their website. Those might seem related, but most realize that those are two very different skill sets and she ended up spending more of her free time learning how to code than what she was paid to do. Any complaint from her was met with "we are all pulling our extra weight to make our dream come true". At some point she started to have medical issues from the stress and lack of sleep due to long hours and was only being paid minimum wage (when she was paid that is). All for the promise that one day they would all make it big and be rich for being there at the start of something great.
@@carolbaker2773 The company had been around for around 7 years iirc and had put out and abandoned 3 or 4 games before, not exactly what I'd call a startup. The rest is probably fairly accurate, but the fact that they didn't even try to make the game they advertised and did it so badly is still impressive (in the worst way) in it's own right. There were a ton of red flags about Fntastic, the only surprise to me is that they actually put out a game.
Partially unrelated to the topic at hand, but I hope once there is a good enough catalog of "cold take" owned by second wind, you guys do a compilation video like they used to do for zero punctuation. Real great sleep Vibe for me personally. And no offense intended. Just the tone and the thoughtful nature usually what I sleep to.
I see it as being a bit like pro wrestling Most fans are 'just' fans and it's only a smaller subset that really gets into the behind-the-scenes stuff, but since they're the people you'll 'bump into' online, they seem over-represented.
I love how you go through and talk about all the juicy conspiracy possibilities before pointing out that, like many things in life, it's probably incompetence not malice. And then you go on to point the finger at everyone including us gamers who keep letting ourselves fall for this crap time and time again. Keep up the fantastic work Sebastian!
To the notion of "hyped within reason", there's an argument to be made that the real test of any complex system isn't how few catastrophes it has, but how easily it recovers from them. It seems this was a pretty decent recovery. As usual, this was quality meta-level analysis of the ridiculous on-goings in the real world of gaming. ❤
Thanks for actually taking us through the timeline. I’ve heard bits and pieces of the story over the last week or two, but this is the first video I’ve seen that’s summarized everything so nicely
This reminds me of another game, appropriately called Abandoned, that somehow got advertised on the Sony YT channel despite the team behind it having a trail of abandoned low effort projects and not much to show about this new game. The last thing I heard about it was that the weird trailer mobile app they were pushing ended up doing nothing. No idea if anything happened after that but I'd be surprised if it resulted in anything resembling an actual game.
I remember that. They just had some pre-bought assets walking down a random hallway. The guy kept insisting that it was real, but the individual assets were quickly discovered. Eventually, they just quietly slipped into the aether. That dev had a long history of abandoning projects, not unlike Fntastic here!
I'm sure if The Day Before's devs had caught mr. ruiz looking up press releases on the game's trailers from the comfort of his own home, he was in real danger of being cut up into little bits and fed to the lead developer's dog.
I'd argue the failure here is the Early Access model and games development's current state overall. It's obvious that the corporations involved were not operating in good faith. (for whatever reason) It's equally obvious that the system we've allowed to develop over the last 20 years has become an unregulated trainwreck as we see more and more of these stories cropping up, each one more absurd than the last.
Honestly I've never heard of this game before the controversy blew, so I appreciate the breakdown here and so fast. Frankly, the most shocking thing about this to me, is that people were _excited_ for a _PvP zombie-survival M M O_ in *_2023_*
2023 has been the most fascinatingly chaotic year for major game releases-we are getting literally everything. Groundbreaking titles that reinvent genres, unfinished messes that shut down studios, sequels that take an already good title and elevate it to new heights, bland forgettable slop that functions but feels entirely soulless, outright scams, unexpected sleeper masterpieces-every release story under the sun. All that needs to be said: Baldur’s Gate 3 and LotR: Gollum released about two months apart. That alone proves 2023 is certainly a year to remember, for better _and_ for worse.
Honestly, the moment I saw anything about the game alarm bells started screaming in my head. I bought into Crowfall, Dual Universe, amd Canelot Unchained. I can smell these things now, you just have to get hit a few times.
Ya know Cold Take is starting to grow into a very close second favorite to Fully Ramblematic for me. All of the interesting crunch of industry talk mixed with relevant gaming topics. Good ass stuff, very excited for more. Love the flavor too
If there is anything that gives me hope for humanities ability to carry on through a struggle, its the Zombie survival community ability to back blatant scams and carry on with hope after every refund and onto the next scam. Truly resolve unmatched.
This is turning into one of my favorite series where gaming is concerned. Your insights are always enlightening and I was looking forward to what you had to say about this mess. Thanks for the hard work (probably more work than the developers put into their game :) )
IGN and Nvidia need to be held some what accountable for promoting the game so much and offering legitimacy to it, without actually playing it themselves
I'll bet the guy at KiraTV is feeling quite justified regarding his predictions of The Day Before that he made some ten months ago in his own video regarding the project as it stood at the time. I remember my takeaway from that video being the conclusion that the developers kept announcing new projects (like Prop Night) in spite of showing so little regarding TDB's own development progress. This alone should have been a big enough red flag, but I can't blame consumers for being uninformed. I'd say if anything, the big takeaway here is that if the developer seems to be promising the stars, look them up on Google and UA-cam, see if someone with more time or more skills at sleuthing than you, has already noticed red flags. If they have, definitely keep your guard up.
Dude I'm so glad you and the other guy were able to take your thing that was so popular and keep it going over here on Second Wind. I had just found your stuff and binge watched it all like two months before you all left and I was thinking the formats you had wouldnt eber come back, but here they are! So cool!
Thank you for covering this. It was well written, researched and kept me entertained the whole video. See you all when we return for the next over hyped game that people spent their money without researching.
Frost, I absolutely love that you’re still getting to do gaming investigative journalism. Your analysis (or postmortem in some cases) is insightful and entertaining. A perfect blend for someone like me who still loves games, but doesn’t have the time to dig in like I used to anymore. Keep up the fantastic work, and if I ever see ya, the next drink will be on me 🥃
5:41 I swear, the music, your voice, and the writing here brings to mind something straight out of a detective noire spoof. I can practically see the rainstorm and you holding a lit cigarrette
Here’s my shot at explaining how this happens: Asking “how did people fall for this?” should remember that people didn’t engage with the whole concept as we see now. A bunch of marketing infrastructure exists to hype these games and algorithms exist to serve that hype to precisely the people who want to get hyped for it most. And that social machinery will do that to any product, legitimate or not. How did people fall for it? The people who did got sold the world and were already selected to be most vulnerable to that kind of marketing. TLDR: Advertising companies try to sell you something regardless of if it’s real or not.
Thank you for such an informative video, not only for explaining the scam but also for finally giving me an answer about what the hell an extraction shooter is.
This is actually the first video I've seen since they started Second Wind. Idk y I watched this particular video. Idc about The Day Before, I barely even knew it existed. But man is this a cool idea for a show. The whole noir detective theme is really cool, I was enthralled despite not caring about the game at all. Lol Edit: Oh yea, and fuck those guys for scamming everyone. I get the idea of making video games is really exciting, but someone really needed to reinforce the idea into them of making smaller games and continuing to learn while doing that until u have enough successes to try something slightly bigger. Part of me wants to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they didn't intend to scam anyone, but this level of incompetence seems suspicious as hell. It stinks no matter how I try to think about it.
It's really refreshing to hear advice about hype that isn't just "don't get excited" or akin to that. It feels like emotional investment is inherently frowned upon for the very real extremes it can be taken to, which I have felt actively hamper my enjoyment of things.
This might just be hindsight, but I’m astonished nobody seemed to notice that this project was more sketch than a takeout menu in the hands of a bored da vinci.
When watching you guys making full lenght documentaries about games with some cultural impact, I have wanted to see same kind of deep dive to something where everything went wrong. But its hard to interview that many people if most of them wish to be called Alan Smithee. So I guess this was the video i really hoped for. Keep being awesome Frost.
The lesson of this story is one as old as time: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Thank you for the reminder, Frost. And beware of hype, people!
I find this amusing because the thing they promised was so far outside my preferences that I just went "Oh, I hope the people who like this sort of thing enjoy it" after seeing someone get really hype about the promotional material Then I went on to not caring about it Then I see this Welp, I'm sorry for anyone who spent time and/or money on this
Another banger for the Cold Take-series! If you take recommendations, I'd be more than happy if at one point you spoke about player anticipation and longstanding 'unfinished' series, like Half-Life or Titanfall.
12:57 on this idea, I will say theres one big red flag in Balan Wonderworld's gameplay reveal that set me off even before the demo. This is gonna sound like such a know-it-all thing but I swear, its the first thing that tipped me off to the game's at least overall gameplay idea When the player characters change into their costumes, the new outfits clearly have nothing to do with the kid's normal design. Doesnt sound big but in other games with big costume gimmicks granting new powers, the player character's outfit is still reflected in the transformation. Rayman 3 and Ape Escape 3 being good examples; you still see the character's personality underneath the new form. In the Balan trailer however, there was absolutely nothing. Right away, what this tells you is that the player character, minus the costume, has a good chance to not do anything. The costumes dont harkin back to the default outfit cause the default outfit isnt special; theres no reason to get attached to the kid cause the kid isnt important. You can critique character design with this too and theres the chance the game just didnt adhere to this design philosophy to begin with, but it was this that was the first red flag for me.
To be honest, I literally never heard of The Day Before until someone in a stream I was watching joked about streaming the game, back when it was still on Steam even though the studio shut down. Apparently there's more to this mess than I realized...
Skill Up did a great deep dive on this topic. He mentioned a few things that weren't brought up here, like that Fntastic were also developing an app that would've been comparable to Microsoft Teams while The Day Before was in development before abandoning it as well.
Hearing this man say "it takes more then thick thighs to pull the wool over my eyes" is a priceless gamer moment
Thick thighs save lives
You say that, but think about how many gamers have thighs pulling the wool over them so hard that they're becoming mummified.
I help work on a project that has some elements which appeal to a very specific subset of people. I've seen em.
"Cheeked up" was pretty great too.
Meanwhile, I'm seriously considering buying Atelier Ryza, just because.
@@Rehteal im automatically hostile to games that try to rely on that shit.
I just genuinely don't understand what made people go so crazy over this game, especially considering how little we got to see of it over the years it was supposedly in development for.
Yeah I really don't get it, none of the trailers had anything original or really did anything to say that this would be a game worth talking about.
It's really hard to comprehend just how stupid people are on average, but events like this put it into painful perspective
I'm amazed that anyone gets excited about (alleged!) open world zombie survival games anymore. That well has been so well and truly tapped that I immediately tune out whenever I hear it... probably why I only started hearing about this game after it finally collapsed
Honestly? People go gaga over open world games despite 99% of them being bad. "This one will be the dayz killer!" "This will be better than botw!" People want to be lied to sadly.
I think a lot of people see a framework and fill in the gaps with what they want to see. its easy to get hyped about something that you know nothing about because you make it what you want to be in your head.
"Takes more than thicc thighs to pull the wool over my eyes." Frost really is the greatest wordsmith of our time.
Rule of thumb: If there's no unscripted gameplay footage in any of the trailers, it's going to be bad. Honestly, I'm surprised this got as much hype as it did, zombie shooters are pretty dime a dozen nowadays. Of course, this is less of a zombie shooter, and more of a post apocalyptic walking simulator where you barely use your gun. Not surprised it turned out to be a big scam.
I couldn't agree more.
Frost is a poetic genius.
@@hazukichanx408 most people do NOT CARE, they want a zombie game, buy a zombie game, got a lame game and just move on after took a massive L.
But at the same time if it is scripted we know it’s just for show to build up hype and pre orders and most games know it’s not in the final product/ does not represent the final product cause it is still in development. I mean look at Ubisoft they are known for their downgrades with previous games.
Honestly the most unbelievable part of all this is that The Day Before was the most-wishlisted game on Steam. There are so, so many online competitive co-op/pvp open world zombie shooters with crafting and survival elements. My Steam queue is flooded with them every time there's a sale. How can that market not be well past its saturation point? Are all the fans of the genre just shambling from one title to the next like some sort of mass herd?
Like some kind of… zombies?
I would've thought Silksong or something triple A (or maybe more recently Hades 2). But competitive online multiplayer gamers are a different breed, and their market trends are quite different.
Thanks to bots, stolen/hacked/sold accounts, and stupid humans, how the modern internet can be gamed, cannot be understated. Skepticism is important for navigating the webs. Hone it, feed it, and ingest healthy doses of it.
@@grindtoothmedia120 It was "most wishlisted" before I first heard of it. That set off a few alarm bells by itself. Especially when you look at what else was on that list. More wishlisted than *Silksong* and freakin' Hades 2?
I can believe it was skulduggery that put it there. It didn't make them not actually do any dev work until the last couple years. That part's weird no matter what.
But I look at the ingredients. Half of the games weren't refunded. So, there was a transfer of money, and a veneer of a shitty game to cover for it. There's a publisher with a company town in Russia. There's a very real possibility the wishlisting was bot activity. Russia's got serious sanctions and botnets out the ass. I think... this wasn't anybody's plan A. I think... I think putting this on the top of the wishlist was a joke or a test of reach. But then, being at the top of the list got the game a lot more attention before people sorta moved on. And then the war started, and Russia got sanctions out the ass.
Like I said, it's not plan A, I think this is lemonade made out of extra lemons. But... those involved knew before the 7th that this was going to happen, and did it anyway. The publisher has made no statements about suing the devs... so they don't view it as malfeasance (or, yanno, can't do that without the devs confessing to a lot more, potentially).
But also, this doesn't have to relate to the Russian intelligence community in any official capacity. It could have turned into a way to get a lot of money out of a lot of stolen credit cards. I just... don't know how much gets eaten by processing fees from the refunds. That might tank the hell out of the whole theory.
I found this game on my steam wishlist and I can't recall at all ever wishlisting it
To call this game a fiasco would be an understatement. Props for covering it though. Scams like this should be archived as a warning that something like this could happen again, and should serve as a reminder to us gamers to not fall for this and be smart with our money.
@@MysteriousStranger50 Just because you're correct doesn't mean you're right.
For me, IGN is somewhat a red flag in itself. Hearing their name reminds me of the bad rating they gave to Alien Isolation.
I'm looking at another exclusively IGN announced a game called blight with the exact same skepticism
@@MysteriousStranger50 let's all laugh at an industry am I right? Haha
@@MysteriousStranger50 If it counts for anything, I never preordered another game after No Man's Sky. It was a harsh lesson, but I did learn from it.
Then again, one drop does not make an ocean.
Wait, how are there still defenders of this game to the point where Nick had to actually debate them? Are people so blind to obvious scams, even after the jig is up? 💀
Have you seen the United States? Yes, we are blind to obvious scams.
It's easier to fool a person than to convince them they've been fooled
Some people keep denying that Covid is real. These humans are too easily deceived, and they need a proper immune system.
Well according to SteamDB there are still around 150 people playing this game. I guess it was the game or their dreams all along.
I was having the same fight with people over Stalker 2. That's definitely a real game, but some of the early trailers definitely looked too good to be true, and I got yelled at over telling people to keep their expectations in check on that one too haha.
I quite like the parallels between the Day Before, and the game that outsold it that came out the same day, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. Owlcat Games and Fntastic are pretty similar studios, Owlcat even being 2 years younger than Fntastic (Founded in 2017 vs 2015) and they both started out with a kickstarted game. However, Owlcat has released 3 major games since it was founded, all extremely well-recieved. The Development of Rogue Trader was done transparently, and as a result has been fantastically successful. We knew what the game actually was for years, and it was more successful despite never being shown off on IGN or Gamespot. It shows the stark differences between people who know what they're doing and people who don't.
While Owlcat is undoubtedly more skilled and more successful than Fntastic, I feel I do have to mention that Owlcat has never released a game that was completed and fully playable at launch. Even Rogue Trader, their most polished game to date, falls apart after the first few acts with loads of bugs and broken quests.
@@NayenezganiThat is certainly a fair statement, but bugs can be fixed. A game pulled from the store after 4 days cannot.
@@thedeathray8620 Definitely true. To Owlcat's credit, they do support their games quite well with patches and DLC.
@@Nayenezgani Hell, this year's GOTY - Baldur's Gate 3, has a rather disappointing third act, the game overall being in a state of jank all the way through to 1.0, from what I've heard.
Getting a big RPG simply working and polished enough to see the surface of seems like high expectations as is. It's like a curse of the genre.
@@thosebloodybadgers8499I've actually compared Rogue Trader and BG3 a few times on the "third act collapse" problem, since both had early access/beta periods where "playtesters" (a term I use loosely because of my next words) didn't have access to the final act/chapters of content. Which means that those areas didn't get the beta treatment and no one could reasonably raise the alarm that if this is released now, the wheels will fall off as soon as players reach Act 3/Chapter 4.
If I had a nickle... etc etc. BG3 had a much longer time in Early Access than Rogue Trader had in beta, yet both have a similar problem--it leaves me wondering if there's a problem with how companies think about playtesting RPGs and other narrative-heavy games.
"Nick Calandra, Editor in chief for the Escapist at the time" that was some subtle shade
The irony of suggesting a "Watch Dog" series for misleading trailers, because I sure remember that first trailer for Watch_Dogs...
Bro, the raspy, smokey, noir voice your using, combined with the dragnet/cold case files/unsolved mysteries structure of this video is absolutely blowing me away. Great work!
"Within reason" is the most impossible thing you could ask someone to do when getting hype over things. But I agree.
It would be nice to think that this will never happen again.
However,
Gamers? Learning from past mistakes? I too wish to live in that alternate timeline.
A series finding red flags in trailers would go crazy.
I can't get enough of these deep dives into issues in the gaming community, and I really admire how Frost can lay out the facts and describe all the conspiracies without committing to any of them. It's hard to separate these things as an outsider, and now I feel like I can actually discuss it without being completely lost.
And doing it with that oh-so-nice Noir voice narration 👍🏼
@@Robstafarian after that Breath of the Wild review and reaction following it, that's a blanket "no" 😂.
@@RobstafarianI could argue that the review itself is why gaming has such a bad reputation. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but Sterling was dismissive and combative in their defense, arrogant and holier-than-thou. I disagree with hatred or vitriol against Sterling and CERTAINLY with the DDOS attack, but Sterling was not innocent and everyone knows it. Sterling was trying to provoke a response and they succeeded, good for them, and I wish them well in their future endeavors which I will casually ignore.
I also respect anyone that chose to follow them, of course! There's more than enough room to choose to whom we give our attention.
@@Robstafarian I'd never heard of Sterling before the controversy and haven't thought of Sterling since, so I had no bias for or against Sterling. I heard about the controversy, saw for myself the review and follow-up, and I believe Sterling was trolling. You don't. That's fair, I'm not trying to convince you otherwise, but the gripes Sterling had don't warrant a 7/10 final review for me.
NGL, a "watchdog" series would be pretty cool. And if it had a bloodhound in a trilby and trenchcoat, that'd probably give Ludo a playmate.
Or it's just Ludo's alter ego.
Now we need Yahtzee making a "Let's all laugh at the industry that never learns anything teeheehee" lookalike for Second Wind. This one, alongside Redfall and other fiascos deserve it.
i think this is what replaced that.
@@SMG-vx3mu actually no, that's the Cold Take, Frost does it. Yahtzee did a couple of those in the old ZP!
@@luizpanigassi no i mean, even back during The Escapist era, i think cold takes was supposed to replace the occasional guide to retarded/special moments in gaming history. though tbf, a variant of those kind of vids has yet to show up on fully ramblomatic, so maybe? but considering this and some of the stuff that was on the escapist version. i think it was basically turned into cold take.
though i guess another thing that could've also replaced the occasional guide to retarded/special moments in gaming history is Extra Punctuation/Semi-Ramblomatic. which is voiced by yahtzee and is a side series that tag alongs with ZP/FR respectively.
i'll be surprised if i see something like the occasional guide to retarded/special moments in gaming history in a FR episode, but there are already like two things that does similar jobs to it: one, while being voiced by someone who isnt yahtzee, is far more simillar to the OG(R/S)MGH MO; and EP/SR, which is voiced by yahtzee, but doesnt really cover the stuff you would find in a OG(R/S)MGH video.
May be part of the ZP copyright... I hate IP laws sometimes
@@JasonX909 well, they can just change the name like Ramblomatic! Different name, same content, no one cares.
The whole "The Day Before" really drives him the fact that gamers out there want that "The Division" experience. See, The Division had something that many people wanted in that game, but it was bogged down by its RPG elements that were added, i.e., the rarity system.
So... if some group of folks want to make a semi-arcade, extraction/survival shooter, there is money to be made there.
Played this at Fyre Festival, loved every minute.
Did they have a booth at DashCon, too?
@@imarobobot8795do you guys not have Tumblrs?
The weirdest thing for me is that I never even heard of this game until it released and everyone started calling it a scam. And I’m on top of all kinds of gaming news
Yeah, pretty sure this game popped into existence just as an alternate timeline merged into ours or something. Hello, alternate timeline people.
Same, I’ve never heard of any of this.
I think I heard of this with the trailer, and I think I thought it was a prequel to the last of us
This was called out by some smaller youtbers as soon as the original 'gameplay' video came out. I've been following this fiasco for about a year on a couple of channels so info was definitely out there well before the disaster of a launch.
I heard of it a couple times but never thought it was so hyped and wishlisted
It's beyond poetic that The Day Before ended the days after.
Two days after.
It was up for 4 days and if it started the day before…
So glad to see this video is accurate unlike so much reporting on this situation. Countless commentators and UA-camrs are claiming the investors are profiting off this disaster and it was planned to fail from the start. That’s obviously not how any of this works. Not that there aren’t people, and industry practices to blame, but this is the first video I’ve seen actually bother to research the situation beyond what their vibes are telling them.
That's the Internet for you. They'll latch onto the biggest news story and scream it as loud as they can to get views. It's happened with recent UA-cam controversies too. Once the internet grabs hold of an opinion they are not letting go, regardless of future facts or developments. This game didn't even get a chance to improve or allow info to come out about what actually happened. A lot of the Internet will now believe it was a planned scam. I'm glad Cold Take did a deeper dive instead of screaming about it being a scam.
@@yourgoodfriend276 mytona ARE basically the same as Fntastic, they're owned by relatives
My take on it was that the developers were a startup that had a vision for a game that they did not have the skills to make and could not afford to hire those that had said skills. And all the delay tactics were used because they kept thinking if they had more time, they could make it work. But the truth was that it couldn't work because they did not have the necessary skills to do it in the first place. I remember having friends that worked for a start-up and all the random bullshit that the owners made her do. Like she was supposed to be the social media manager but they had her learning code so she could maintain their website. Those might seem related, but most realize that those are two very different skill sets and she ended up spending more of her free time learning how to code than what she was paid to do. Any complaint from her was met with "we are all pulling our extra weight to make our dream come true". At some point she started to have medical issues from the stress and lack of sleep due to long hours and was only being paid minimum wage (when she was paid that is). All for the promise that one day they would all make it big and be rich for being there at the start of something great.
@@carolbaker2773 The company had been around for around 7 years iirc and had put out and abandoned 3 or 4 games before, not exactly what I'd call a startup. The rest is probably fairly accurate, but the fact that they didn't even try to make the game they advertised and did it so badly is still impressive (in the worst way) in it's own right. There were a ton of red flags about Fntastic, the only surprise to me is that they actually put out a game.
Partially unrelated to the topic at hand, but I hope once there is a good enough catalog of "cold take" owned by second wind, you guys do a compilation video like they used to do for zero punctuation. Real great sleep Vibe for me personally. And no offense intended. Just the tone and the thoughtful nature usually what I sleep to.
+1
I'm so blown away by the fact over 200k bought this game. I thought everyone knew this "game" was a scam and not even remotely real.
fools will be fools, they do not care as all they want is a pvp zombie survival shooter online only trash
I see it as being a bit like pro wrestling
Most fans are 'just' fans and it's only a smaller subset that really gets into the behind-the-scenes stuff, but since they're the people you'll 'bump into' online, they seem over-represented.
I love the fact youtube auto tagged this video as featuring Watch_Dogs gameplay when it was all The Day Before.
“Tin Foil Fedora.” Best line ever.
M'Egyptian Alien *Tips fedora*
Idk but this guy sounds like a 1920s PI breaking down a mystery to a group of befuddled cops and I vibe with it
I love how you go through and talk about all the juicy conspiracy possibilities before pointing out that, like many things in life, it's probably incompetence not malice. And then you go on to point the finger at everyone including us gamers who keep letting ourselves fall for this crap time and time again. Keep up the fantastic work Sebastian!
Man its gotta be hard to pick worst game of the year since they seem determined to one up each other every other day.
Forspoken
Redfall
Gollum
Kong
The Walking Dead
The Day Before
Which am I missing? Although Forspoken may fall in top blandest.
@matosz23 Starfield seems popular for worst game. Although personally I would put it in the blandest list.
@@kempo_95
Starfield sounds like a bland one to me.
I feel like we need a new category, called "most creatively and morally bankrupt."
@@matosz23 Crime Boss: Rockay City is another
To the notion of "hyped within reason", there's an argument to be made that the real test of any complex system isn't how few catastrophes it has, but how easily it recovers from them. It seems this was a pretty decent recovery.
As usual, this was quality meta-level analysis of the ridiculous on-goings in the real world of gaming. ❤
Mondays are the worst. Thankfully, a Cold Take with Frost helps us ease into the day.
Thanks for actually taking us through the timeline. I’ve heard bits and pieces of the story over the last week or two, but this is the first video I’ve seen that’s summarized everything so nicely
This reminds me of another game, appropriately called Abandoned, that somehow got advertised on the Sony YT channel despite the team behind it having a trail of abandoned low effort projects and not much to show about this new game. The last thing I heard about it was that the weird trailer mobile app they were pushing ended up doing nothing. No idea if anything happened after that but I'd be surprised if it resulted in anything resembling an actual game.
I remember that. They just had some pre-bought assets walking down a random hallway. The guy kept insisting that it was real, but the individual assets were quickly discovered. Eventually, they just quietly slipped into the aether. That dev had a long history of abandoning projects, not unlike Fntastic here!
A masterwork of investigative journalism. A real treat to watch!
oh yeah its right up there with watergate
I'm sure if The Day Before's devs had caught mr. ruiz looking up press releases on the game's trailers from the comfort of his own home, he was in real danger of being cut up into little bits and fed to the lead developer's dog.
@@ZechsMerquise73 they aren't Saudi Arabia
@@ZechsMerquise73 lol yeah a bit hyperbolic
I'd argue the failure here is the Early Access model and games development's current state overall.
It's obvious that the corporations involved were not operating in good faith. (for whatever reason)
It's equally obvious that the system we've allowed to develop over the last 20 years has become an
unregulated trainwreck as we see more and more of these stories cropping up, each one more absurd
than the last.
Finally the perfect topic for Frost's detective monologs
Honestly I've never heard of this game before the controversy blew, so I appreciate the breakdown here and so fast. Frankly, the most shocking thing about this to me, is that people were _excited_ for a _PvP zombie-survival M M O_ in *_2023_*
2023 has been the most fascinatingly chaotic year for major game releases-we are getting literally everything. Groundbreaking titles that reinvent genres, unfinished messes that shut down studios, sequels that take an already good title and elevate it to new heights, bland forgettable slop that functions but feels entirely soulless, outright scams, unexpected sleeper masterpieces-every release story under the sun.
All that needs to be said: Baldur’s Gate 3 and LotR: Gollum released about two months apart. That alone proves 2023 is certainly a year to remember, for better _and_ for worse.
Honestly, the moment I saw anything about the game alarm bells started screaming in my head. I bought into Crowfall, Dual Universe, amd Canelot Unchained. I can smell these things now, you just have to get hit a few times.
Really enjoyed this video, love the gumshoe detective style. Would watch more videos done in this style.
Okay, but rolling up in a tank shouting " Heeeeyy Motherfuckeeerrrsss!" Is pretty on point lol
I guess this is the quality of game you get when you call your employees volunteers.
Ya know Cold Take is starting to grow into a very close second favorite to Fully Ramblematic for me. All of the interesting crunch of industry talk mixed with relevant gaming topics. Good ass stuff, very excited for more.
Love the flavor too
If there is anything that gives me hope for humanities ability to carry on through a struggle, its the Zombie survival community ability to back blatant scams and carry on with hope after every refund and onto the next scam. Truly resolve unmatched.
This is turning into one of my favorite series where gaming is concerned. Your insights are always enlightening and I was looking forward to what you had to say about this mess. Thanks for the hard work (probably more work than the developers put into their game :) )
I somehow never heard of this game until all the controversy blew up around it.
IGN and Nvidia need to be held some what accountable for promoting the game so much and offering legitimacy to it, without actually playing it themselves
I'll bet the guy at KiraTV is feeling quite justified regarding his predictions of The Day Before that he made some ten months ago in his own video regarding the project as it stood at the time. I remember my takeaway from that video being the conclusion that the developers kept announcing new projects (like Prop Night) in spite of showing so little regarding TDB's own development progress. This alone should have been a big enough red flag, but I can't blame consumers for being uninformed. I'd say if anything, the big takeaway here is that if the developer seems to be promising the stars, look them up on Google and UA-cam, see if someone with more time or more skills at sleuthing than you, has already noticed red flags. If they have, definitely keep your guard up.
Dude I'm so glad you and the other guy were able to take your thing that was so popular and keep it going over here on Second Wind. I had just found your stuff and binge watched it all like two months before you all left and I was thinking the formats you had wouldnt eber come back, but here they are! So cool!
I like that watchdog Idea for theses types of things
exactly why i ignore all hype and wait for the finished product before deciding.
Thank you for covering this. It was well written, researched and kept me entertained the whole video. See you all when we return for the next over hyped game that people spent their money without researching.
I just discovered this video series and I love the style, I never knew I needed a noir detective talking about videogames.
Frost, I absolutely love that you’re still getting to do gaming investigative journalism. Your analysis (or postmortem in some cases) is insightful and entertaining. A perfect blend for someone like me who still loves games, but doesn’t have the time to dig in like I used to anymore. Keep up the fantastic work, and if I ever see ya, the next drink will be on me 🥃
That last line is key, " Stay hype, but within reason."
5:41 I swear, the music, your voice, and the writing here brings to mind something straight out of a detective noire spoof. I can practically see the rainstorm and you holding a lit cigarrette
Here’s my shot at explaining how this happens:
Asking “how did people fall for this?” should remember that people didn’t engage with the whole concept as we see now.
A bunch of marketing infrastructure exists to hype these games and algorithms exist to serve that hype to precisely the people who want to get hyped for it most. And that social machinery will do that to any product, legitimate or not.
How did people fall for it? The people who did got sold the world and were already selected to be most vulnerable to that kind of marketing.
TLDR: Advertising companies try to sell you something regardless of if it’s real or not.
Frost nailed the "an investigator down on his luck" theme.
Sebastian has the *perfect* voice and delivery style for this series.
Thank you for such an informative video, not only for explaining the scam but also for finally giving me an answer about what the hell an extraction shooter is.
This is actually the first video I've seen since they started Second Wind. Idk y I watched this particular video. Idc about The Day Before, I barely even knew it existed. But man is this a cool idea for a show. The whole noir detective theme is really cool, I was enthralled despite not caring about the game at all. Lol
Edit: Oh yea, and fuck those guys for scamming everyone. I get the idea of making video games is really exciting, but someone really needed to reinforce the idea into them of making smaller games and continuing to learn while doing that until u have enough successes to try something slightly bigger. Part of me wants to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they didn't intend to scam anyone, but this level of incompetence seems suspicious as hell. It stinks no matter how I try to think about it.
It's really refreshing to hear advice about hype that isn't just "don't get excited" or akin to that. It feels like emotional investment is inherently frowned upon for the very real extremes it can be taken to, which I have felt actively hamper my enjoyment of things.
"Tinfoil fedora" for game speculation is a beautiful phrase. Thank you Frost, and well done Nick.
"It takes more than thick thighs to pull the wool over my eyes."
This is the kind of Shakespearean eloquence that I subscribe for.
A watchdog series would be really interesting. Instruct us on how to spot the signs of fishy game design, Teach
0:00 Huh... Fairly positive opinion he seems to have there
He's allowed to change his mind
This might just be hindsight, but I’m astonished nobody seemed to notice that this project was more sketch than a takeout menu in the hands of a bored da vinci.
SO happy to hear that iconic music back, it just wasn’t quite the same without it :)
"Takes a lot more than thicc thighs to pull the wool over my eyes" Frost is stronger than most of us 😂
I’m so impressed with the channel! Freed from the clutches of the corporate, every single one of your shows has become spectacular. Excellent work!
I’m so obsessed with the dissonant theme music for this show
When watching you guys making full lenght documentaries about games with some cultural impact, I have wanted to see same kind of deep dive to something where everything went wrong.
But its hard to interview that many people if most of them wish to be called Alan Smithee. So I guess this was the video i really hoped for. Keep being awesome Frost.
You guys picking apart trailers for what smells would not only help educate, but would be a great watch, actually!
Leave it to Second Wind to do the most comprehensive and well written dive into the Day Before fiasco. Bravo folks.
5:41 Absolute poetry. I want this on a T-shirt.
Kudos Frost n all at Second Wind. quality was never in question, n views are through the roof to what was. Top Top buzz Nice one. Love it x
Commenting to satiate the algorithm gods, but I also have to say, I can’t get enough of the second wind content. Keep it up!
I truly did not hear a word about this game before it's release, I'm way further out of the loop than I thought...
The lesson of this story is one as old as time: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Thank you for the reminder, Frost. And beware of hype, people!
You have the perfect voice for a film noir detective, Frost. This was a great ep too!
Still can't understand how people could be hyped by a The Division "clone".
I find this amusing because the thing they promised was so far outside my preferences that I just went "Oh, I hope the people who like this sort of thing enjoy it" after seeing someone get really hype about the promotional material
Then I went on to not caring about it
Then I see this
Welp, I'm sorry for anyone who spent time and/or money on this
"It was not good, and it was not true', genius...
Well researched and excellently presented, as usual!
Another banger for the Cold Take-series!
If you take recommendations, I'd be more than happy if at one point you spoke about player anticipation and longstanding 'unfinished' series, like Half-Life or Titanfall.
Pretty cool that it ended up as a Cold Take episode! Good job on that research, Nick & Frost 👌🏿
12:57 on this idea, I will say theres one big red flag in Balan Wonderworld's gameplay reveal that set me off even before the demo. This is gonna sound like such a know-it-all thing but I swear, its the first thing that tipped me off to the game's at least overall gameplay idea
When the player characters change into their costumes, the new outfits clearly have nothing to do with the kid's normal design. Doesnt sound big but in other games with big costume gimmicks granting new powers, the player character's outfit is still reflected in the transformation. Rayman 3 and Ape Escape 3 being good examples; you still see the character's personality underneath the new form. In the Balan trailer however, there was absolutely nothing. Right away, what this tells you is that the player character, minus the costume, has a good chance to not do anything. The costumes dont harkin back to the default outfit cause the default outfit isnt special; theres no reason to get attached to the kid cause the kid isnt important. You can critique character design with this too and theres the chance the game just didnt adhere to this design philosophy to begin with, but it was this that was the first red flag for me.
I love the hardscrabble noir detective vibes in this video. Perfect
Loving that you actually got to play the role of a hard-boiled detective this time around
Dig the Noir Game detective vibe. Keep this series up guys this is a hit!
Best comment I saw on topic:
- What is tradional occupation in Yakutia?
- Deer farming.
To be honest, I literally never heard of The Day Before until someone in a stream I was watching joked about streaming the game, back when it was still on Steam even though the studio shut down. Apparently there's more to this mess than I realized...
Great video. In response to the end, I would love a "Watchdog" series picking apart red flags in trailers and bullshot. Good idea!
OT feedback: Your voice is much clearer now, I was having trouble with past videos, all the way back to ZP days
One of your theories about MYTONA and FNTASTIC being in it together... actually makes the most sense.
The take is cold
The voice is hot
I can’t believe people bought this game
When it clearly was a cash grab with no shame
Mom’s spaghetti
The issue is, as proven by Steph sterling, there is a lot of potential for pushback when it comes to any amount of anti-hype
Skill Up did a great deep dive on this topic. He mentioned a few things that weren't brought up here, like that Fntastic were also developing an app that would've been comparable to Microsoft Teams while The Day Before was in development before abandoning it as well.
Stay hyped, within reason. Words to live by.
I love the silver screen detective noir style so cool
This is such a nice series. Love that opening. All the best!