The Day Before Keys Selling For Wild Amounts Following Studio Closure

The Day Before launched in such a terrible state that its developer shut its doors and is offering refunds to anyone who was even remotely excited about the game. However, it seems as though some people still want to play, as keys are selling for huge markups through resale sites.

When The Day Before was released on December 7, 2023, most players thought it was a scam. The world is empty, enemies and other players display at epic proportions for seemingly no reason, and there’s a serious problem with players getting killed at extraction points by campers. Despite the game being so bad that developer Fntastic would rather shut down than continue to work on it, some players are desperate to get their hands on a now incredibly expensive key.

Related: The Day Before Players are Flocking to Once Human’s Beta

Resellers are Charging Users four or Five Times What The Day Before Was Worth at Launch

While most sensible fans have now abandoned The Day Before, many seeking out another strange open world survival MMO experience in the Once Human Beta, we were surprised to find today that there’s still a market for Fntastic’s dead and broken title.

YouTuber Garrus posted an image on Twitter this morning showing that not only are people, themselves included, trying to buy a copy of The Day Before, they’re being forced to pay €200 or more to do so. They explained that they want to see and show their fans how terrible the game is before its servers are shut down, but resellers have clearly realized there’s a market for it judging by these prices.

Why Are The Day Before Keys so Expensive?

There are two reasons we believe The Day Before Keys are so expensive now that the game is no longer for sale on Steam and developer Fntastic has shut down. First, as we’ve explained above, content creators want to play the game and show their audiences how bad it is before it’s gone forever. Key owners know that there’s a market for this and are making the most of it.

Second, there’s likely a small portion of game preservationists out there who want to own a copy of The Day Before so they can show it to future generations. There are lessons to be learned from Fntastic’s mistakes, but they’ll all be lost to history without a copy of the game and the ability to record it.

Games similar to The Day Before sometimes become the subject of fan projects that set up custom servers to bring them back to life. While it’s highly unlikely this game will ever see updates, official or fan-made, it’s another reason the keys could be selling for so much today.

Finding another example of a website selling The Day Before Keys took us a matter of seconds. The screenshot we took above was from a sale on G2A where users are being charged $235 for a copy of the game.