Vivendi drops support for Tribes: Vengeance

Vivendi Universal has announced that no more support will be offered for Irrational's PC shooter Tribes: Vengeance, disappointing many members of the game's community.

The announcement came last week in the form of a post on the Tribes message board from VU marketing manager Guy Welch which stated: "Development on the previously announced Tribes: Vengeance 1.1 update has been cancelled. No further updates to Tribes: Vengeance are planned."

There was a strong and immediate reaction from Tribes fans, many of whom were already disgruntled that no full patches had been offered since the game's October release in the US. The online discussion became so heated that Welch eventually started a new thread and deleted the original on the grounds that it was "completely unconstructive."

Vivendi has not said why it made the decision to discontinue support, but US website

GameSpot suggests that poor sales could be to blame - just over 43,000 copies of Vengeance were sold in North America by the end of February, less than 10 per cent of the number of Half-Life 2 units sold during the same period.

Vivendi was unavailable for comment at the time of writing but regardless of the reasons behind the decision, the future of the Tribes franchise is clearly now in doubt.