It sounds like I'm in a similar situation as a lot of people here. Given my financial situation, I can't justify buying an XBox 360. But if they offered Arena on Live for Windows, I'd be one of the first people in line for it.
The BSG Arena game was release for windows, and since I am a console challenged person I keep hoping to see that it will be released for the PC.
Yes, it was released for Windows, but it appears that it wasn't released with the "Live for Windows" tag. Therefore, I believe that XBox 360 and PC players can't play against one another; perhaps someone else can confirm this. While that isn't necessarily a gamebreaker, cross-platform play is something that all parties would like to have.
Cross-platform play has already been done with one game (Shadowrun), but after going to a couple sites, it appears that that game had pretty negative reviews. There's another game coming out for the Xbox 360 in February (Universe at War) which offers cross-platform play. It got pretty good reviews for the PC, so it'll be interesting to see how that one does.
I suppose Super Wing Commander isn't available for the PC... but is live for windows (the only way Arena will ever be on PC) really a big enough market to warrant a port? As such, I don't imagine it would be that hard to port to that platform but control would be an issue. You would almost certainly need to require that the PC players have a 360 style controler for the game as well since the controls were built from the ground up for it. It would somewhat difficult to find a control scheme for the mouse and keyboard hat felt right I would imagine. That's development money that might not be justifiable for a niche market. I would rather they make an add-on for Arena before they bother porting it to the PC. Just some more fighters (heavy fighters anyone?) or a third faction would be cool, though one more multiplayer mode and map would be even more great.
Boom Boom Rocket got an add-on after all.
I can't find any info about Games for Windows sales figures; I'd be interested if anyone could find some numbers. Porting the platform shouldn't be too difficult. Shadowrun supposedly offered the option of keyboard/mouse control or a gamepad; perhaps a PC Arena game would allow a similar option.
BBR did have an add-on, but from what I've read, it seems to me that the gameplay for BBR is much more "add-on oriented." It's a similar game to Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero; you time your patterns to music. All the programmer would have to do is program up a few songs and you've got an add-on. With Arena, you have to create new ships or maps; I imagine that would require more of a programming effort.
If I were to create an add-on to WC:Arena, I'd consider adding to the single-player aspect of the game to make it more similar to the PC games. Perhaps a campaign (not necessarily branching like WC1 or 2, but that would be awesome), with the player starting out as a new pilot onboard a carrier. The pilot would only have access to one ship, then gradually work his way up the ranks (and ships), moving to different squadrons as time went on. I can't say I have an idea how the SP missions could work in Arena's current gaming engine (perhaps micro-jump-points to the Nav Points which are different maps, or maybe they could find a way to implement an autopilot), but they could think something up.
One advantage to this method is that the demo could offer the first system worth of missions, a la Secret Ops. Another advantage is they could create add-ons as episodic releases. Since the size of the XBLA games was boosted from 50 to 150 MB shortly before Arena came out, that gives them plenty of space to work with.
Well, time will tell. For now, I'm just crossing my fingers that a PC port will eventually happen.