At the tail-end of June, Temtem developer Crema Games made the surprise reveal of Temtem Showdown, a free-to-play, PvP-centric standalone game. Since its release, its landed “Mixed” reviews on Steam and only 11 players in its last 24-hour period after an all-time peak of 186 players. That’s caused some concern among fans on Reddit and prompted game director Guillermo Andrades to come rushing to its defense.
Andrades first pushes back against the notion that Crema should focus on adding more monsters, zones, and dojos to Temtem, arguing that those additions barely moved the playerbase needle during early access and were “not sustainable.” He also says that developing the MMO was costly and that the small bump of interest from more monsters and zones would not be enough to cover the expense. Finally, he believes that making the game more grindy would only drive players away since there’s already a perception that Temtem is grindy to begin with.
“That’s why we’re trying different things that help Temtem in the long run and are more cost-efficient,” Andrades explains. “Showdown was cheap to build because it uses the same foundation as Temtem and required few devs during a few weeks to be built.”
Despite this pushback and claims from Andrades that Temtem’s PvP community is “relatively large compared to the total userbase,” he does admit that Showdown’s release “hasn’t worked as expected,” while also pointing to a 2018 quote about how the original game was never meant to be massive in scale, with a focus on MMO social features instead of things like raids, enormous dungeons, or never-ending quests.
“TLDR it’s complicated, doing games and meeting expectations is hard,” Andrades closes.
