The Public Failure Playbook

Public implosions are on my mind this week. On the journalism side of things, we saw media startup The Messenger shut down after less than a year in the centrist clickbait business, with CEO Jimmy Finkelstein burning through a $50 million investment to leave hundreds of journalists without healthcare, severance, or even a website to prove they once had jobs. And in video games, on Thursday German outlet Game Two released a video about their reporting alongside another German outlet, GameStar, into the rise and fall of The Day Before, which went from being Steam’s most anticipated game to being shut down completely almost immediately after release. These are different stories, but they’re also the same: men who didn’t seem to want to fuck up nevertheless fucking up, whose hubris stopped them from righting things before it was too late, and who hurt the people who believed in them in the process. 

Game Two’s video cites anonymous sources detailing the working conditions at The Day Before studio Fntastic, who say the direction of the game changed repeatedly at the whims of studio founders Eduard and Aisen Gotovtsev. Game Two reports The Day Before started as a small survival game before expanding in scope and ambition, echoing previous reporting that alleges a similar lack of clarity about what the game was meant to be. Fntastic, who has previously only made smaller works like survival game The Wild Eight and multiplayer game Propnight, used The Day Before to chase a AAA-style breakthrough.The video details how The Day Before’s character creator, features, and even look were apparently randomly changed as the brothers became enamored of popular releases like Spider-Man 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Hogwarts Legacy, leaving developers overworked and struggling.

Sources also report terrible work conditions inside Fntastic, saying that developers (many of whom, you may recall, were unpaid volunteers) were made to pay for their own work equipment, randomly fired by the brothers as a motivational tool, and, in one case, made to pay the studio a fine of nearly $2000 USD because they’d turned in low-quality voice recordings. The video alleges that studio management used their self-made, failed version of Slack, Continent, to monitor employees, and that a tester was fired a week before the game’s release because the Gotovtsevs found a bug.

Game Two says that “In our conversations [with sources], hardly anyone portrayed the brothers as deliberate scammers. Fundamentally, they would have liked to release a good, successful game, but would have been too fickle, disorganized, and, above all, megalomaniacal to do so.”

Game Two’s reporting is in no way sympathetic to the brothers, but its detailing of their background stuck out to me. Hailing from a frigid mining city in Russia with a nascent tech scene, the Gotovtsevs seemed to have a lot of ambition and earnestly want success in the games space. One of the area’s success stories, and an inspiration to the brothers, was the two brothers who founded The Day Before’s publisher Mytona. Mytona was known for mobile games, and Eduard Gotovtsev had started his games career making mobile games as well. Mytona first provided the financial backing to get The Wild Eight over its Kickstarter line, and later, Game Two says, “treated [the Gotovtsevs] like geniuses during development [of The Day Before], who should not be disturbed with trivial matters.” Mytona reportedly stayed hands-off until the very end of development, though it’s unclear the extent to which it knew what a disaster it had.  

Something that was notable about the days after The Day Before’s launch was how frequently Fntastic insisted it had never set out to scam anyone. There hadn’t been a  Kickstarter or any pre-order money; everyone who’d bought the game was ultimately refunded when the studio shut down. On the one hand, given the game’s hugely visible troubles, it felt impossible to believe the studio was acting in good faith. On the other, in the absence of a clear scam, it seemed entirely possible that a studio with a pedigree in smaller games simply couldn’t deliver what it had promised.

The story of two ambitious guys wanting to be like their heroes but getting in over their heads would be a sad but moving one; unfortunately, it’s not the story we’ve got. Game Two’s video details how the brothers kept overpromising to the public and being poor bosses to their employees, many of whom joined Fntastic for the same reason it seems the Gotovtsevs started it: wanting to find opportunities in game development in parts of the world where those opportunities could be hard to come by. It seems like no one wanted to be a bad guy, or to get rich quick through shoddy products or deception. But the Gotovtsevs didn’t seem to stop themselves from being the bad guys either. In fact, they’ve already opened a new studio to make a mobile game and are even reportedly enlisting Fntastic devs to help. You could see this as them refusing to let failure stop them from pursuing their ambitions, and trying to bring ex-Fntastic devs along for the ride. Or, you could see it as an all-too-familiar example of self-deception and evasion of consequences, one that probably only leads to more heartbreak for people who get involved with it. 

In his excellent article about The Messenger, Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton writes that Messenger founder and CEO Finkelstein was “the guy who had the hubris — the decadence — to name himself starting quarterback and ran a good team into the ground.” You could swap the Gotovtsevs’ names for Finkelstein with ease. There are echoes of Fntastic’s fate in The Messenger’s, or vice versa: Game Two’s sources say the Gotovtsevs weren’t even around the day of The Day Before’s launch, as if they knew it would be a flop. Similarly, Messenger staff were left to their own devices the day of the site’s closure, ultimately finding out they were losing their jobs from outside reporting. The site was hastily shuttered and its archives taken offline; similarly, while some Fntastic developers wanted to continue working on The Day Before, the Gotovtsevs appeared in Microsoft Teams to announce the studio’s closure a few days after launch; hours later, they shut off internal comms, laid everyone off, and ultimately took the whole game offline. A recent message from Fntastic placed some of the blame for The Day Before’s failure on “bloggers” and “content creators” who “made huge money by creating false content.” Finkelstein, likewise, cited “economic headwinds” that the outlet “could not survive” for its failures, rather than his own mismanagement of money and people.

These similarities aren’t that shocking; I’d argue they’re the core pillars of the public fuck-up playbook. Part of me wants to find a deeper reason for why the Gotovtsevs are who they seem to be. Is it because of how hard it is to break into the games industry, especially if you don’t live in a major tech city? Is it the consequence of video games’ obsession with auteurs? Is it the seemingly inescapable legacy of traumatic development cycles baked into some of gaming’s biggest successes, such as Red Dead Redemption 2, Bioshock Infinite, and The Last of Us Part II? Or were they simply, as so many people who get some power seem to be, jerks? 

If you wanted to be compassionate to Finkelstein–which I’d argue you shouldn’t–you could see him as a victim of his own myth-making, a believer in a dream that was doomed to fail before it even started. I can extend to him little compassion but a certain very small pity for his cluelessness; I’ve been at the receiving end of too many terrible media decisions to believe things would have turned out differently if he’d gone to therapy and made better friends. If he were earnest about The Messenger, as Benton writes, “he could’ve stood by his bet and its ‘important mission.’” You could say the same of the Gotovtsevs. 

At the end of the day, however these men sleep at night is less of a tragedy than the fates of the people who believed in them. The Gotovtsevs are still better off than many of The Day Before’s developers, who may, as one source said, be glad to have more game development experience, but whose wagons are now forever hitched to a public disaster and will be competing with folks with less tarnished resumes in a shrinking job market. You could say the same for The Messenger’s journalists, who are bound to face uncomfortable conversations in future job interviews, if they’re able to get interviews at all. At the end of the day, their stories are more important than those of the men who screwed them over.