[2021] This game is going to die/have a very small playerbase by the time Arbury actually comes.

Hey, I'm the CM and I had a long-ass message written explaining the why's of our communication style and our reasons for some things you mention, but I'm not sure you want dev input, or if this is just a thought you wanted to share with others. Just lmk if you want that wall of text lol for now I offer this one:
I think sometimes our players forget that, while this is a game for them, this is our literal way of survival, and the source of my cat's food and well-being (priority). We're the ones who want to see it succeed the most, and we're doing the best we can. But success looks different to different people, and different studios work in different ways. We could use some improvements in some areas? Sure as heck. We're at the end of the day people, none of us is perfect. I'd love to do dev-logs, but we can't. I'd love to have more to share about the far-end future, but until we're closer to it, we can't. If you throw more feedback my way I'll consider it, like I always do, and we'll try our best to adapt to it. We're always open for improvements, but that doesn't meant everything will be doable.

We might've made a mistake with EA because there's a huge chunk of void time in-between island patches, it's true, but at the same time, the game grew so much and became so much better because we got out on EA and gave the community a chance to give feedback and influence it. So many new features and changes have originated in the community that, while we might've sacrificed some of our hype for it, it's worth it because we've gained a lot of valuable player insight and input that have ultimately made Temtem better. Even right now, islands take longer because they've gotten bigger, and grander, and the scope is bigger than originally planned. On a different universe we could've ignored EA altogether, save us all the trouble and develop in our quiet little office without saying anything, and maybe we'd have launched Temtem this year, but it wouldn't have been the game it is going to be. Might've been a mistake, but those happen, and we cannot un-Early Access Temtem now; we can only try to provide such a good experience in the long run that it'll be worth all the wait, which is what we're aiming to do, and as soon as we can properly talk about it all we will, I promise.

Hopefully Arbury will launch soon, and we'll get the chance to show you what we've been working on for the past months. Plus, we'll finally move on to the stage where we focus on making it all make sense, on talking about 1.0 and all the good things it will bring for the long-time average Temtem enjoyers <3

They are being taken seriously, and it's really hard to echo everything that gets talked about in the Discord server where we usually chat with players, but it's been addressed by the game director and will see changes with or after 1.0.
The problem with explaining what we're thinking of is that nothing is set in stone yet, really, and it needs a solid foundation to work. Sharing such an early stage of an idea leads to a massive amount of noise that we cannot handle at the moment. As soon as we're in that stage of development we'll talk about it more, but it's def on our radar, and it's being handled internally!

As I said, that's a long answer that I thought maybe you guys would not want to read, not that I didn't care to explain. But first I wanna point out that we do show tiny sneak peeks of a lot of stuff, from new tems and VFX to patch notes to island music and concept art, so I don't think it's fair to say we don't do tiny sneak peeks at all. If you're on here, Twitter, the discord server or even Facebook or Instagram, you should've seen us post and spoil stuff, which I'd consider communication, so you're either going to have to detail to me what you consider communication or specify on which places you're missing these sneak-peeks or spoilers. I don't think all communication platforms serve the same purpose or have the same unspoken rules, and I don't believe a piece of music is fitting for a Steam update, but that doesn't make it less of a sneak-peek, and we place them out there on various different places so they'll reach everyone somehow.
The way our studio works makes dev-blogs really hard. Different people are working on different pipelines and islands, a lot of stuff cannot be revealed because it's pending 3rd party approval (and this means some things might not even see the light of day by external forces), and there's things we cannot talk about without touching issues or bits of the updates that fall under those categories, or that would be too big of a spoiler. Of course, there's people who oversee everything in the studio and who kinda know about what's going on, but they are by far the busiest people in here, and could not stop to write that devblog no matter how hard they tried, and if they did it would be at the cost of stealing development time. I read someone in the comments say 1person projects have devlogs, and that makes a lot of sense, because all the info is centralized and because usually 1person projects don't have publishers, 3rd parties involved and hardcore deadlines. Sometimes we don't even have any "spoilerable" content we could show in a devlog.
One small monthly post in, say, August, would look exactly the same as the monthly post in June, July and probably September, because working on features usually takes months. It doesn't mean we're not working or progressing, but that the general outlook of a feature or an update doesn't have material changes from one month to the next. And even if we do progress a lot on a feature, we cannot confirm it until we get it approved by 3rd parties. Confirming something to then have it taken back? That's a nightmare.
Would these small posts make people happy? Some, I'm sure. But they're also going to cause clutter and noise, and I know some other people might perceive them as negative and a sign of no progress. And mind you, I can deal with that, sad as it makes me. But ultimately it's mostly a matter of not having the time to stop the machines to gather everyone up, and the lack of tangible, shareable content or progress until we reach the latest stages of development.

We do try to keep people informed, though. We do talk about ideas we're considering in the Discord server, where most of our dedicated playerbase is, and in our forums, where we can actually look at feedback without going bonkers. And still, the amount of feedback we can process is limited, we're a small team and we can only read so much in the amount of time we have in a day. But we answer all the questions that we get if we can, all of them, and we're not hiding anywhere. I'm here, I can be reached pretty much anywhere. We just want to share stuff when it is safe to do so.

If you have any ideas on how to make all these little chats and spoilers more easily available to the general public without causing clutter in platforms reserved for important matters, I am always open to ideas.

I understand that, as players, all this might seem too chaotic to be true or too little of an excuse, and I can, to a degree, understand you, but please know that everything seems simpler on the outside. What good would it mean for us to purposefully withhold information? What do we gain? I really really really don't like having people mad or disappointed at us, and if any of you work in anything that involves customers you'll know how depressing it can be to have them yell or be mad at you :harold:
Also (I know where your comment is coming from and I understand what you mean but) a lot of people are indeed asking us to rush development :__) There's no such thing as a generalized kind of user that we can totally get to know, understand and cater to, and we need to think of everyone when we make decisions, both game-wise and everythingelse-wise. Simple as it might seem, there's a lot of trick to communicating when developing a game, and nothing we're doing (or not doing) is done out of spite or lack of concern for you guys.

You bring up a good point that gamers don't exactly think about devs' lives when they play, but we do have lives nonetheless haha And by no means should you ever force yourself to play a game you don't enjoy. Temtem gets so many changes and updates, and has so much room for development, that we actually recommend taking breaks and coming back when we've had time to fix some of the current issues it might present.
As I think I mentioned in either my reply to you or someone else's, we do answer concerns when they reach us and if we can. But I think that when these threads come up, the reactions to concerns being addressed are portrayed in a very euphemistic and utopian way. Sometimes you guys ask us about current problems that have solutions in the future, but it's stuff that isn't even designed or planned yet, and when we say "yeah, we're thinking about that", that does never, in my experience, cover the "need to be heard", even when it should. take 5% radars, for example. We said we were thinking about where to place them back, we expressed it would probably not be until after 1.0, but that we were thinking about it, and that still gets brought up every time, even though we've heard you and we're working on it and we've expressed such. Do we have a final solution to that? Not yet. Will be able to share it when we have it? Maybe, depending on how much of a spoiler it is to end-game content. Will we talk about it once it's closer and solid and the content it accompanies is no longer a spoiler? 100% we will.
We cannot talk about a solution we haven't designed, and we can't plan super far ahead when a single update is full of stuff that requires our attention. This is a step by step process.
There's also always going to be a difference in opinions. We might have an idea for the game that is not your idea for the game. Your idea for the game is not your neighbor's idea for the game. There's not an universal solution to anything and we will not always be able to compromise. This happens with every game, even those that put out weekly devlogs. So if communication is there, but the info and solutions provided are not the ones you and those 150 players you used as an example want, what then? Will the problem still be communication?

I entirely disagree that the playerbase is only playing or not because of this, though. We know where our spikes are and when and why they happen, and roughly 65%-70% of Temtem players play the game as a campaign game. They play the story, they catch the new tems, they do the quests and then they leave. And that is fine, there are many ways to play Temtem and as long as everyone's enjoying themselves and the game, we do not mind which one you choose. Temtem was designed as a campaign story game with an online element to it, in fact, but the playerbase that remains and plays the game like an MMO (you guys, from the guess of it) is actually the side of the playerbase that we talk to and listen to the most, the one that ignites the most changes and the one we try to understand best. We appreciate all types of players, but it's important to keep in mind that playerbase right now is not a very accurate indicative of the amount of people that enjoy or will enjoy Temtem.

All that said, I've also explained some of the issues our particular team faces when doing devlogs in another comment, and I think actual, concrete suggestions would go further than saying "we want more communication", because that's such a broad and subjective term. If you guys have particular ideas do share them, and we can discuss the pros and cons, and see if we can apply them.

haha I actually liked your answer a lot from someone who's named AngrySaiyan.
I've covered some of this in other comments and I don't wanna be a broken record, so I'll skip to the concrete ideas you mention at the bottom.
When we share stuff on Twitter or Facebook there's always the implied info that this is something the team has achieved or finished and that we're showing progress on the new island. If you think we should explicitly include that, do say so. In the last few months we've shared VFX, tems, music and clothing, which usually serve as a pointer of which parts of the update are already complete. But if we need to be clearer about it, I can try.
Q&As are spiky because people always want the design team, and the design team cannot stop to breathe right now, and even if they could, most of the questions would be answered with "we still haven't properly delimited that/we can't currently talk about that". We've held Q&As in the past and I'd love to have more, and maybe if at some point things are super stable and we have everything planned out, we could try having one for feedback and current issues.
As for calls for feedback, we do hold them in our forums (crema.gg/forums) and occasionally on the Twitter/Discord server in the form of threads, polls or just a random question thrown at people. But truly, it's not that we're lacking feedback, we're simply lacking the time to adapt and implement that feedback. But we're not deaf at all, we read our socials (including Reddit), we know what the community thinks are problems and we're working on some of those, those we can solve and agree on haha

Most of our recurring/dedicated playerbase is in the Discord server and know this. I am glad it's given you hope, but really, I don't think this is enough for most people as we've already said this often.
The final project is still far, and we don't know how it'll look like. We don't want to give people the false hope that it's going to be exactly what they want, because we haven't even had time yet to sit and think about it.
What people think about Crema varies from person to person. We've said often that Temtem was created as a campaign game with online elements built in, which directly clashes with this idea that we're trying to get people to log in and dump hours. We also encourage breaks when people get burnt out, when they find the game is no longer entertaining. The only thing we're actually trying to get people to do is enjoy Temtem for as long as they can, and give us some time until we can show a finished, coherent and consistent product.