Fntastic Founders Respond to Criticism regarding Volunteering

Recently, a story concerning volunteering in the Yakut Fntastic, which is currently developing an MMO blockbuster The Day Before, has been widely circulated in Western and domestic media. A number of publications accused the studio of advocating the use of unpaid labor. This morning, the company made an explanatory position on this issue.

But first, let’s remind you that it all started with a post on the Fntastic website itself. It said:

• there are two types of volunteers in the company — employees who work for a salary, and people who are ready to help Fntastic in their free time;
• part-time volunteers are primarily engaged in localization and moderation of communities, but they can also work on new game functionality;
• monetary compensation for the work of volunteers is not provided (their work is stimulated by various certificates and free codes).

It was this post that got into rotation, and caused numerous publications, either ironic about Fntastic’s approach to work, or openly criticizing it.

Just below we publish Fntastic’s response to numerous publications. It is given with minor abbreviations.

Volunteering at Fntastic means that a person works voluntarily. We consider all team members, including employees, to be volunteers, i.e. volunteers.Fntastic is a commercial organization, but with the resources we have, we intend to give people fantastic products, create better conditions for our team members, and also benefit the world with our resources.

For example, last year during the large-scale forest fires raging in Siberia, we donated money to charity.Anyone who is open to life can become a volunteer at Fntastic.

In our organization, volunteers are divided into two types.Today we have more than 100 internal volunteers (employees) from Russia, Singapore, the Netherlands, Thailand, Finland, Kazakhstan and Belarus who work as engineers, artists, HR specialists, etc.

We also have 40 external volunteers on a pro bono basis from around the world who help to test and analyze our products at the earliest stage of development.

For example, many of them offered their help in testing, which will take place this week, the upcoming update of our game Propnight, published by our partner MYTONA.In addition to testing games, external volunteers offer their assistance in localization of our products into different languages free of charge.

Last year we collaborated with a studio specializing in translations and localization. As the reaction of the players showed, the result of their work on localization of Propnight turned out to be unsatisfactory.Most of the translations were redone by our external volunteers.

Together with them, we found bugs in Propnight, dealt with cheaters and even organized our communities in Discord.New points of view are always welcome in our organization, so we give our most active external volunteers, who acted on a free basis, the opportunity to transfer to the staff of internal volunteers (employees).

Only recently, one of our very first volunteers from the Netherlands became an internal volunteer (employee), and we are going to make such transfers more and more often.
The text is signed by the names of the founders of the studio — Eduard and Aisen Gotovtsev.