Allow us a moment to recap events before diving in to the headline above because this one is going to need some context. Last June, the creature capturing MMO Temtem announced the release of a free-to-play standalone PvP side game called Temtem Showdown, which was designed to get players right into creature battling against others in casual matches, ranked matches, and its competitive esports scene that started in 2022.
Showdown’s launch arrived to mixed reviews and an anemic player count, causing game director Guillermo Andrades to defend it as a “cost-efficient” way of supporting the main MMO. Meanwhile the TemCS had problems of its own as bugs in the game halted its world championship event for a time. With all of that in mind, developer Crema Games has confirmed that both the TemCS competitive scene and Showdown are being closed up for good.
The announcement features an in-depth postmortem about the TemCS, acknowledging the myriad bugs that caused delays and some that still managed to work their way into competition, accentuating some of the more positive aspects of the competitive scene’s impact, and discussing how systems that handled seeding could have been handled better (or had bugs of their own). The post ultimately admits the TemCS was designed to draw in new players and attention to Temtem itself, but it failed to do both, as it mostly engaged the few existing players already deep in the competitive portion of the MMO.
As a result of the TemCS going dark, the standalone Showdown game will also be going away starting January 29th. Crema blames overall poor performance, a lack of general interest, and the daunting nature of getting new players into competition, and the studio further admits that the side game was drawing resources away from Temtem itself, as the standalone client required patching, testing, and bug fixing – something that at this point is a guaranteed outcome for genre followers.
“[H]indsight is 20/20, and of course, there’s a million things we would’ve done differently knowing what we now know,” the studio writes. “This is a tough decision to make, but one we believe is necessary for our team, resources, and games. […] These changes will not affect the Temtem game for worse in any way. If anything, it’ll allow us to focus all of our bug finding and bug fixing energy into Temtem.”
