Fntastic, the studio behind The Day Before, has released yet another statement regarding the state of the game and its ongoing trademark dispute. In a short post on Twitter yesterday afternoon, Fntastic said that its trademark has apparently been snaffled by a calendar app, that its videos have been taken down from YouTube as a result of trademark issue, and that the current holder of the trademark has offered to discuss things with the studio. The studio followed up its tweet with a link to a delisted YouTube video which—per the Wayback Machine—used to show a clip of someone playing The Day Before on PC.
#thedaybefore pic.twitter.com/2q98hE1i9fFebruary 12, 2023
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The statement says only that the “so-called ‘owner'” of The Day Before’s trademark is the “creator of the calendar app”. Fntastic doesn’t explicitly name or link it, but I have to assume that the app in question is TheDayBefore (D-Day Countdown) from TheDayBefore Inc. When Fntastic first announced its trademark troubles, it looked like its game’s name had been nabbed by a South Korean applicant, and that app is a South Korean product, after all.
So, does it look like matters are on their way to being resolved? Not really! Fntastic says that the app creator “ambiguously offers to contact him [sic] to discuss something, but what?” I’m not a copyright lawyer but I’d imagine what he wants to discuss is the disputed trademark, yet the tone of Fntastic’s statement makes it sound like the studio isn’t keen to enter that discussion itself.
The studio concludes its statement with a rallying cry: “We’ll fight. Power is in the truth,” which might have gone over better if Fntastic hadn’t burnt pretty much every shred of goodwill it’s ever had over the course of the last couple of months. As it is, it just feels like the studio has fallen victim to its own blunders, and statements like these come off as a desperate attempt to recast itself in the role of an underdog, an attempt which, predictably, hasn’t gone down well with its audience.
So it’s not going well, and it still really feels like Fntastic desperately needs to hire a proper marketing team instead of firing off Twitter statements like this one and the one it put out last week decrying “disinformation”. I keep thinking Fntastic has hit the nadir with its former fans, yet somehow I keep being proven wrong.