The Day Before is facing reviews so negative that its development studio is already shutting down. But that didn’t stop developers of DayZ, perhaps the most popular survival zombie title ever, from poking fun at the trainwreck of a situation.
Celebrating DayZ‘s 10th year anniversary, developers posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Dec. 11 showcasing a brief history of the game’s last 10 years. Contained in the highlights are a few jokes aimed directly at The Day Before, specifically the game’s lack of certain basic features such as vaulting and melee combat. They even added a scratched text saying “dead game” in the corner, implying that even 10 years later, DayZ is flourishing while their latest competitor is already dead in the dirt less than a week after launch.
The Day Before is on the road to becoming the worst-rated Steam game of all time, following a sketchy campaign of copied trailers, overtly ambitious promises, and a generally suspicious development process. The game, advertised as an open-world zombie survival title, was released as an extraction third-person shooter with few zombies and little content. That, paired with its failure to deliver on ambitious promises, resulted in the game’s abysmally poor launch and the imminent shutdown of the game’s development studio, FNTASTIC.
To put things into perspective, DayZ has over 300,000 reviews on Steam and is one of the biggest, if not most important, games ever released. It set the foundations for the Early Access trend and served as the predecessor to the world-conquering battle royale genre that dominated the gaming scene for years. Even now, battle royale titles are some of the most prominent in gaming, including Warzone, PUBG, Fortnite, and many others, with hundreds of millions of players. The Day Before only survived until a few days after release, with its second-day player counts tanking by nearly 90 percent, according to SteamDB.
I can’t say I’m surprised that developers of such an iconic zombie surival game have jumped on the bandwagon of berating The Day Before, seeing as the game was poised to become its primary competitor. At any rate, DayZ perseveres and The Day Before serves as a reminder to gamers to take all advertisements, no matter how flashy and ambitious, with a huge grain of salt.
