Bossa Studios has bailed as Decksplash is no more

Last week, Surgeon Simulator developers Bossa Studios left the fate of its then-in-development Decksplash in the hands of players. Unfortunately, it failed to grab the attention required to create “a thriving community of people,” meaning that the title is no more.

“Like any proud parent, we love Decksplash, but unlike deluded creators, we want to believe that you love it too,” Bossa explained in a blog post. “Thus we've devised a ‘first of its kind' experiment: The Splash N' Grab!”

This was conducted via Decksplash being released for free for one week, in which Bossa hoped to see 100,000 people download and play the game for it to be a thing. The reasoning behind such a strange decision was that “if there aren’t 100K people out there who’d be willing to play the game for free then we think there’s probably not going to be enough people who’d be willing to pay for the game to have a thriving community of people.”

Unfortunately, today’s announcement from the studio spells the end of the game, with a note to thank fans and explain how Bossa plans to move forward after spending a year in-development with Decksplash.

“The players who experienced the game liked it, but in the end there just wasn’t enough of them to guarantee a healthy online community and keep the game’s matchmaking alive for the long run,” says Henrique Olifiers, co-founder of Bossa Studios in today’s announcement.

“The lesson to take home is that, though not the best, this outcome is a good one for everyone involved: its players won’t spend money on a game that won’t survive the long haul, the team can move on to a new Bossa project with a sense of closure having done their best with Decksplash, and we tried a new way of validating a multiplayer game. Should we have cancelled the game without this experiment, a ‘what if’ would always be there in the back of our minds.

“All in all, we create hundreds of games every year during our monthly game jams, the vast majority of them failing to even being shown to the players. Decksplash just went further than the rest before teaching us a thing or two, enabling us to go forth with yet another piece of the creative puzzle we put together every day.”

“We want to thank everyone who supported us during the Free Week and let you all know that while this is the end of our story, we're glad we got to share it with you,” reads the final message on the Decksplash website.

KitGuru Says: While it was a unique blend of Splatoon and Tony Hawks, it didn’t quite play the way people expected it to. This is disappointing for those that did enjoy the title, but it would have ended in frustration with long matchmaking times and unfair balancing due to a small community anyway, so it’s best to see Bossa moving on to other projects. Are you sad to see Decksplash go?

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