Bossa Studios issues itself an unusual objective earlier this month as it announced that a one-week free trial on Steam would determine the future of the Decksplash project. They felt 100,000 players during the trial would indicate the game has a future as during alpha-testing they'd struggle to reach out beyond a hardcore community. The game's one line pitch would have it down as "Tony Hawk meets Splatoon".
No exact numbers exist (as far as we know), but while the trial did reach north of 50,000 players it did not reach the target sum of 100,000. And so, Decksplash has been cancelled before it ever really came to life proper.
A message on the official website reads as follows:
"Decksplash unfortunately didn't hit it's target and production on the game will now stop.
We always knew that 100k was a big target, but it was the only way to make sure the game was a viable product for both yourselves and us in the long term, now we've gotten our answer.
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.
The team working on Decksplash will now move onto other projects, taking the knowledge gained from the past year to build an even better game.
At Bossa Studios we believe the best way to make games is to fail fast and move on to bigger, better things rather than sinking time into a project without a bright future.
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!
Love Decksplash.
x"