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Earlier in the week, we published an interview with Bossa Studios explaining why they were giving away their new title, Decksplash, for free. The idea was to test the viability of the project ahead of ploughing development time into development when interest in the product wasn’t there for gamers.
The game was limited to 100,000 downloads, the magic number that Bossa assigned to make the project worth developing and the free period lasted just one week. Sadly for Bossa, the number of players fell short of their target and true to their word, the project has now been put on the shelf.
The project would have gone into Early Access should it have been successfully received. Henrique Olifiers, co-founder of Bossa Studios addressed the result of the free giveaway in a press release. “So here we are, at the wrap-up time of Decksplash’s Free Week experiment," he started. "It has been quite a nail-biting ride for the team, watching numbers climbing, players having fun, maths, wagers and predictions around the studio done. In the end, we fell short of the 100,000 players we set ourselves as a goal.
"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.”
