The premise could not be more desirable. A post-apocalyptic open-world multiplayer zombie game, focused on resource gathering, exploration, and, of course, combat when the going gets tough. A kind of The Last of Us, but to share with players from all over the world. To round it off, the videos announcing the game couldn't be more incredible. Is called The Day Before and it promised them so much happiness that it became the most desired game in the gigantic store on-line Steam. It went on the market on the 7th and since then it has become world news because, well, it's crap.
There were, yes, indications that the game might not be what it promised, but they were not so clear. Or maybe it's just that everyone decided to ignore them. Because it is not the first time that we talk about the desire that the community has to exceed its own expectations. And we have already pointed out here how the sector takes advantage of the hyperconnection in which players live to launch messages that in seconds acquire an excessive echo. Not to mention an entire ecosystem of youtubers, twitchers, tiktokers and all kinds of content creators who feed on news and events like this. Furthermore, let's be clear, in a young industry like this, novelty is so popular that it substantially affects even the awards, which always value surprises above those who meet expectations, no matter how high they may be. Finally, the successive delays that the game developers (a small Russian studio founded in 2015 without any notable game) had been announcing did not raise suspicions either in a scenario of massive delays derived from the pandemic. Everyone saw but no one wanted to see, contributing to the machine of hype follow its course.
But then came the real game. And the bubble burst.
What in the videos were full streets, challenging enemies and overwhelming graphics became, in the real game, empty scenarios, wasted difficulty and an experience full of bugs. The euphoria turned into a feeling of being teased. We talk in this space about many neologisms, but that of vaporwarewhich is used in a derogatory way to talk about the products of software that do not deliver what they promise, had not been through these parts yet. Welcome be.
No Man's Sky (2016) and Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) are the most recent and clamorous examples of games that were not what they promised, but while those were limited to disappointing after media stories that escaped the control of their creators, what The Day Before has more signs of falling directly into the swampy terrain of scam.
Rendered videos were sold as game videos; A lot of aspects that the game was supposed to include were falsified. And a series of bad practices specific to the digital world were also incurred, such as unnecessarily extending the first two hours of the game in order to use up the Steam trial period (which returns the money if it is claimed before that short period expires). term). A couple of days ago the game announced that it will permanently close its servers in January. It will be as if it never existed. If it ever existed.
But let's not fool ourselves: no matter how much people point out The Day Before as a specific deception in the world of video games, the truth is that it exemplifies a fairly widespread practice throughout the digital world, from social networks to digital media: that of companies that, with apparent good ideas and speeches full of trust they set out to raise money from private investors who see in this ecosystem a quick method of making money, who, however, often find that their non-refundable investment has vanished. It's a bad art that we should all be more aware of. So I hope that, at least, this is useful for The Day Before, that game that, once played, we can only grant the virtue of having a great title. At least, we cannot deny that.
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