The Developer of Tribes 3 Has Ditched the Game Just 3 Months After Launch

ign.com:

The developer of Tribes 3 has signaled plans to move on from the game after it failed to find an audience.

Tribes 3 launched in March on Steam billed as the triumphant return of the fast-paced multiplayer first-person shooter series whose games were popular in the late 90s and early 2000s. But despite a ‘mostly positive’ Steam user review rating, player numbers were extremely low. According to SteamDB, Tribes 3 hit a peak of 890 concurrent players on Valve’s platform upon launch, with just 26 concurrent players at the time of this article’s publication.

Developer Prophecy Games issued an update to say neither Tribes 3 or its prior game, the already shuttered Starsiege Deadzone, saw enough success to justify the team’s continued focus. As a result, it’s giving those who’ve spent money in those games credits towards its upcoming fast-paced 3v3 sports shooter Ultra Strikers.

“These credits are meant to give back to players who supported us in early development,” Prophecy Games said. “We’re doing our best to support Tribes 3 with limited updates (along with an upcoming discount sale to bring in more players), and plan to return to Starsiege Deadzone once the company has the resources, but unfortunately neither game had enough success yet to support the studio and can’t be our main development focus right now (as much as we love them).

“Thank you for your support. Going forward, we’ll continue to focus on updating existing games as much as we can, while creating new games players enjoy. We love making games, we love playing games, and thanks again for giving our games a shot and being part of the community!”

Over the last few weeks, even before the release of this latest statement, some Tribes 3 players had hit out at Prophecy Games for what they considered to be an "abandonment" of the game. Tribes 3, down to a ‘mixed’ user review rating on Steam for recent reviews, is not a free-to-play game, although it does feature various microtransactions.

One player with over 250 hours