The free week didn’t go well enough.
Sadly, Bossa Studios’ Decksplash failed its test. During the free week, only about 60,000 players picked up the game. As said in the cancellation announcement:
It’s not all tears, though… The Free Week proved what we suspected at the start: Decksplash is a good game, evidenced by its 79-86 Steam score throughout the week. 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.
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
So from all of us here in the Decksplash team, Thank you for your support and we’ll see you on our next big adventure!
So, while Decksplash is riding into the sunset, they at least learned something from it. And while it’s a shame it didn’t make it, there will be other games to come.
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