Developer asks for free money to reform company.
I guess real life does run on remakes. Fntastic isn’t a name we expected to ever hear again, but here we are. If you don’t recall the story from last year, Fntastic are/were a developer who spent a long time peddling a rather suspicious game called The Day Before. After over a year of delays and questionable video evidence that the game was real, we learned the truth.
That The Day Before was a big scam. The preview videos were fake and the company had lied repeatedly through their teeth about mechanics that were claimed to be already in the game. What was promised as an open world MMO-ish game released as an incredibly buggy extraction game.
Fntastic almost immediately went out of business, the game was pulled from sale with Valve forcibly refunded all purchases because the game was a scam. In the ensuing days, Fntastic would blame everyone but themselves including YouTuber critics while attempting to gaslight the greater internet on whether or not they lied in their trailers. Spoiler; they did.
The problem with Fntastic of course is that they’re not just con artists, they’re also really stupid. So they haven’t had any luck convincing…anyone that they are reputable and honest despite the constant self-references to being honest people.
Well Fntastic is back, and not only are they back but they’re already mooching off the public by opening up a Kickstarter. The development firm of Dewey, Cheatem, And Howe has launched a campaign asking for $15k to “help Fntastic return.” And also develop some trashy mobile game called Escape Factory.
The Kickstarter is sitting at 8 backers with $219 pledged, and we’re willing to guess given the company’s compulsive habit of lying that at least a few of those pledges are from employees.
In case you’re curious the new rendition of Fntastic is still so incompetent that they shipped their demo with a backup folder that explicitly says “dontshipitwithyourgame.” It includes C++ source code for the game itself.
Fntastic is already gaslighting people on Twitter by claiming that The Day Before wasn’t a scam because customers all got their money back. We should note that an unsuccessful, embarrassingly botched, incompetently run scam that failed to get any money because the people at the helm were a bunch of buffoons is still a scam. Just because the folks at Fntastic would make Ed, Edd, and Eddy look like marketing geniuses by comparison doesn’t mean that their scam wasn’t in fact a scam.
You can grab some merch at the Fntastic merch store, where the company has gone with the fittingly ridiculous and awful “back to win” slogan. The merch store is either poorly stocked or is playing a horrible attempt at looking popular by listing the shirt and hat as “sold out.”
Our guess is Fntastic can’t afford to actually print all the clothes and is on very limited inventory. The company admits they are using unpaid labor for some of their team. Again.
Their demo for Escape Factory, fittingly, has absolutely nobody playing on it. Other than these two French guys who can’t get a lobby going because you need a minimum of four players.
Fntastic clawed its way out of Hell only to find themselves in the same world that doesn’t want them around, and I think we’d all be more appreciative if they just went back into their grave and let us cement over the top of it.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
MMO Fallout 