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!”

Unfortunately neither game had enough success yet to support the studio and can’t be our main development focus right now. 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 on Tribes 3 left a negative review that detailed a number of issues with the game and Prophecy’s management of it, hitting out at the lack of updates and various broken promises.

“Matches are largely against either extremely veteran players clinging to their last laughable hope that this game will somehow become something that the public cares about, or bots, so have fun either being completely stomped, or completely stomping the other team,” the Steam user said.

It’s a sad end to Tribes 3 after just three months of early access, and a potential death knell for the once-popular franchise. Prophecy Games will of course be pinning its hopes on Ultra Strikers, although after what happened to Tribes 3 it has work to do to win back player trust.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].