When last we left The Day Before, once upon a time the second-most wishlisted game on Steam, it was embroiled in a bizarre trademark dispute with a South Korean calendar app. That argument had seen the game's release date pushed back by eight months, its videos delisted from YouTube, and its Steam page summarily yanked off the platform.
But you can't keep a good man down, or a company that's committed so many resources to a project that it's too late to back out now. PCGamesN reports that the game's developer, Fntastic, has announced via The Day Before Discord that it's going to get a beta test ahead of its November 10 release date. What's more, the company says the game should come back to Steam, too.
Fntastic was pleased to "announce that the game will officially release on November 10th 2023 without any further delay," read the announcement by Kentain, an official admin on The Day Before's Discord. Although games don't usually have to reaffirm release dates they've already announced, the sheer chaos of The Day Before's development probably makes that kind of restatement necessary.
"As we get closer to the release date, we will be conducting a beta test for the game," the update continued, "This will give players the opportunity to try out the game before it is released," and will let you give Fntastic "valuable feedback" that it will use to "improve the final product".
Kentain didn't say when that beta would take place, or if it would be open or closed, but a demo of some kind is pretty much mandatory at this point. It might have been one of Steam's most-anticipated games several months ago, but the fiasco around its trademark and some red flags in its development—we barely saw anything of The Day Before outside of some heavily orchestrated trailers for a while—means that there are now plenty of people who doubt the game exists in any substantive capacity at all. Fntastic probably hopes that a beta period will, if nothing else, convince sceptics it has actually made a real videogame.
"And for those wondering if the game is gonna be on Steam," Kentain concludes, "it should be on Steam yes". The team at Fntastic is "working on it," says the admin.
Of course, Fntastic itself claimed that its Steam page had been blocked "at the request of a private individual" who held a US trademark for the name 'The Day Before', who later turned out to be the owner of the Korean TheDayBefore calendar app. I have to imagine that the Steam page won't spring back to life until that dispute is resolved, which might be a tricky task given that the Korean app developers claim to hold the copyright in six countries plus the European Union.
Perhaps Fntastic has had a breakthrough in their argument with TheDayBefore, or perhaps the pledge to return to Steam is more of a fervent wish. I suspect we'll learn which it is over the course of the next few months.
