Dataminer claims The Day Before dev’s new game is an asset flip

A day after The Day Before devs announced a Kickstarter project, data miners found information suggesting the new game is little more than an asset flip.

Fntastic, the disgraced studio behind The Day Before, reared its head once again on September 26, 2024, this time asking for crowdfunding support.

While the developer supposedly shut down in late 2023, it hopes a new Kickstarter initiative will allow for a “recovery plan” and the creation of a game entitled Escape Factory. Such an announcement was immediately met with skepticism from all corners of the internet.

Within 24 hours of the news, a dataminer shared information suggesting the internet had it right. A Steam Community post from game developer and data miner Occular Malice pinpoints several examples that show Escape Factory is just an asset flip.

Occular Malice noted on Twitter/X that Fntastic quickly had their post removed, but a web.archive save kept the comment intact.

According to the data miner’s findings, “The core of the [new] game’s networking, lobby, and matchmaking is all Unity demo code [that’s] available on Github for learning to create multiplayer games.”

Fntastic’s official Kickstarter page describes Escape Factory as a physics-based, co-op escape game where four to eight players will navigate “dangerous factories.”

The studio is asking for over $15,000 worth of support by the end of October. As of writing, about two dozen backers have tossed a few coins for The Day Before devs, amounting to $496 for the work-in-progress.

Notably, the team founded by brothers Ed and Aisen Gotovtsev previously dismissed scam accusations based on the fact that they never asked for crowdfunding and refunded all purchases when The Day Before went belly up.

Since then, a documentary has outed the poor conditions under which the Gotovtsev-run development team worked.