Librty wrote:
So, why doesn't the app do Showdown anymore? I thought it was before... Is it coming back eventually?
Great question. If anyone knows the answer, they're not telling.
I have my theories on this, though. When they brought out the new version of the app a few years ago, Showdown and Spotlight were not supported. At that time, the only major tournament BT was running was the Smartest Bar competition, which was focused on SIX. Because of this, and because that game was two nights a week (so one set of code could cover two premium games), I suspect that there was an imperative to get that premium game coded first.
As to why they chose to do Playback next instead of Showdown or Spotlight, there have been several theories proposed. One of the most common is that the coding was harder for those games because of the interactive aspect of the Category Round in Showdown and the "enter the year" round in Spotlight which are different from most basic game dynamics in Countdown, etc. I don't know enough about coding to know whether this is true or not, but it could not have been an insurmountable problem: the first app supported these games just fine.
So my theory is simply that they just ran out of money. All of this was going on as BT seemed to be circling the drain and looking for a buyer. It had already sold off other parts of the business, was consistently reporting quarterly losses, and its stock price had plummeted to the point where it was threatened with de-listing from the stock exchange on more than one occasion. It even stopped sending out prizes to the winners of the competitions it was running (several teams are still waiting for their Smartest Bar trophies from fall of 2019). I'm guessing that once BT got SIX and Playback running on the app, it intended to do the same for SD and SL next; but by then it had no resources left to devote to it as it went into survival mode. It laid off the vast majority of its staff during COVID and still seems to be operating on a shoestring as the new owner tries to right the ship.
The new owner has been alerted to this issue by several of us, but I would not hold my breath to see Showdown supported in the near future. In the longer term, hope springs eternal, though.