The Day Before has been removed from Steam and pushed back to November due to a strange copyright claim

The months leading up to a game’s release are always full of last-minute panics for developers, but the team behind The Day Before is having it the worst of most right now. Despite being the second most wish-listed game on the platform just over a month before its scheduled March 1st release, the team behind The Day Before was removed from Steam without warning due to a copyright claim.

Fntastic, the developers of the game, clearly had a tough 24 hours. After to her twitter, they had only been made aware of the copyright claim that resulted in The Day Before being removed from Steam on January 24th a few days earlier and had been working to resolve the issue when the game was delisted. Their story is that they were unaware of another application to trademark the name just before they were able to. The confusion was enough that The Day Before’s release was pushed back to November so they could sort out any issues that come with this legal trap.

It’s pretty clear that the developers were taken by surprise when The Day Before was removed from Steam. When it first happened, they sent a post to their community claiming that it was due to maintenance on the platform. The team at Fntastic were aware of the copyright claim against the game, but didn’t believe that was the reason the game was delisted so suddenly. It wasn’t until a few hours later that they clarified the issue on Twitter, probably after having very panicked discussions with Valve employees.

It’s hard not to sympathize with the team that put so much work into the game. The open-world MMO, set in a post-apocalyptic America, was a little over a month from going live when all of this happened and was highly anticipated by players. The release of a new gameplay video has also been delayed while the team consults attorneys to avoid conflicting with other legal issues.