Wipe out! Bossa Studios cancel Decksplash

Bossa Studios, the folks behind Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread, have cancelled their latest game after it failed to draw enough players during a free open beta. Decksplash was a multiplayer game blending the skateboard stunts of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater with the ground-painting territory control battles of Splatoon. Were enough people in such a game to make it worth finishing? Bossa hoped to find out my inviting everyone to play for a week, setting a target of reaching 100,000 players. If they hit it, they'd launch Decksplash into early access. If not, they'd cancel it. It did not, and they have cancelled it.

"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," Bossa co-founder Henrique Olifiers said in today's announcement. He continued:

"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."

I played a little of the demo and eh, it was okay, but the skateboarding wasn't as fun as a full skateboarding game and the territory battling wasn't as fun as Splatoon. I'd rather be playing either one than the two combined. Also the name is awful.

Bossa are still working on craft-o-airship MMO Worlds Adrift and cat dating sim Purrfect Date. Brendan had a go at Worlds Adrift earlier this year and ended up getting into a fight over a parking space. You can't take him anywhere.