Bossa Studios, the company best known for Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread, have canceled their latest game after only a week on Steam Early Access. Released to Steam on November 4, Bossa head Henrique Olifiers announced in a statement on November 10 that development on DeckSplash would be coming to an end.
More to the Story
There’s more to the story than a developer suddenly deciding to quit. Before its release, Olifiers announced that Decksplash would be hitting Early Access, and would need one hundred thousand players if they were going to continue. The reason for this is simple. Sure, some of that is marketing, but it’s also a realistic statement. DeckSplash is an online-only multiplayer game, and those games need a ton of players, otherwise there is no game.
By not hitting that minimum threshold, Bossa decided it would’nt be worth the money to continue development on the game if nobody was going to play it. Bossa doesn’t have to spend a ton of money finishing a game only a handful will play, those handful don’t have to spend money on what will quickly become a dead game, and future game developers have a new model to test out their online games: threaten to take it away if nobody plays.
To find out more about the game and the circumstances behind it, check out this week’s episode of Tales from Early Access above.
