[UPDATE] The Day Before Devs FNTASTIC Are Looking for Volunteers to Help With Aspects of Development

[UPDATE 3:00 PM PDT/6:00 PM EDT] Fntastic's founders Eduard and Aisen Gotovtsev have sent along a statement in response to our reporting, detailing a bit more about their philosophy regarding volunteers at the company.

The statement talks about how the team sees each member as a "volunteer," full-time employee or otherwise, stating that they have "over 100 full-time internal volunteers (employees)" based all around the world, from Russia, Thailand, Ukraine and more. Fntastic also states that they have more than 40 "external volunteers (supporters)" around the world helping with testing and reviews of their product. Whether these "volunteers" are paid contractors or un-paid workers is unclear, though based on the language it can be assumed "supporters" are unpaid workers. 

The team also states that it's a "commercial organization" and aims to give its customers "fantastic products," as well as "create the best conditions for our team members," and contribute to charity, which it stated it did helping out with the massive wildfire in Siberia.

Fntastic explains that its ideal for volunteers comes from the idea of "a person" who "works willingly for a common cause." The statement also addresses the question of why they would be looking for volunteers to localize their projects. The founders offer up an explanation that their past work paying an external studio to localize Propnight, though they go on to state that that work had to be cleaned up by "enthusiastic volunteers (supporters)" because the work the studio did "was not so perfect."

The statement goes on to say that Fntastic also offers a chance for "external volunteers (supporters)" a chance to be recruited to full-time work, citing a recent example of an unpaid worker in the Netherlands being brought on full-time (MMORPG.com was able to corroborate this with the employee separately).The statement itself opened up more questions, such as whether employees are okay with being equated to volunteer labor, how resources are allocated to ensure that the company can pay its employees while also dedicating funds to charity, further clarification on what an un-paid volunteer is being expected to do and what compensation they can expect in return, as well as a further breakdown of paid to un-paid labor going on within the studio. We've reached out for more clarification on this and will update this story further if we receive a response.

Original story continues below....

According to a new report, Fntastic, developer of upcoming MMO, The Day Before, is looking for paid and unpaid "volunteers" in order to help the company on some aspects of development.  While the use of the term “volunteers “ is potentially confusing, it seems that there's still a search for free labor to complete the upcoming and anticipated game.

The studio’s site has a section  that says that they build their culture on volunteering and talk about full-time volunteers, who are paid a salary but part-time volunteers “get cool rewards, participation certificates, and free codes”.

According to a post they say "we'd love to expand our team with other passionate and dedicated people who enjoy supporting, sharing feedback and suggestions, and bringing experiences to bear on our team” and “we could use some more assistance, [from]… a lot of volunteers who would like to help us out and make something great out of it together “.

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Part timers seem to be expected to do jobs like “translating to community moderating” and offering skills and ideas to “improve our projects”. Zach Jackson of Well Played also names localization as one of the tasks in mind as part of what the company named in a statement, and emphasizes that the volunteer work for codes and swag is not in code writing or pure development.

A Fntastic rep has told me that the volunteering (unpaid) aspect does not relate to "code writing or development itself". Just things like localisation and moderation. Have asked for more information.

— Zach Jackson (@tightinthejorts) June 27, 2022

There are volunteer teams working on MMORPGs out there. City of Titans comes to mind, along with many private server groups working to preserve otherwise gone experiences. This is different because it seems that at Fntastic, there are salaried employees and a search for free labor for work that is generally compensated work at most studios, like localization and moderation.  Adding to the potential confusion and possible exploitation is the vague notion of volunteers getting codes and “cool rewards” to “improve our projects”. With a vague description like that, anything potentially goes.

We’ve reached out to Fntastic on this matter and will have updates if they respond for clarification.