criticalmass said:
But the fan community still grows? It's amazing. In times when many companies need to dish out at least two releases in a series per year to get their fan base focussed, WC slowly gains momentum again, thanks only to - what indeed?
I know this may be stepping on a lot of people's toes, but I'd place a large bet on the release of Privateer:Remake, despite all the debate around it.
That's a pretty short term theory describing a very long term trend. Here's a bar chart demonstrating our own traffic for the last eighty months. The low points coincide with the cancellation of the in-production Wing Commander games and disbanding of the Origin Maverick Team.
https://www.wcnews.com/statistics/monthly_hits.shtml
The Privateer Remake came out three months ago. Our growth has been a slow and gradual hard-earned process over the last sixty months. Notice the spike in traffic from the new people who visitied after the remake came out, and then the drop off as casual fans finished with it. If you draw a mathematical trend line of our traffic for the last five years, there is no substantial deviation because of the release of Prophecy Advance, Standoff, Flight Commander or any other project. There are certainly spikes in traffic for each of these events, but none of these things cause
growth in and of themselves. In many ways, projects like Fleet Action, WC Invasion, Holding the Line, Unknown Enemy, the WC Zone, the Heart of the T and other projects are what made things like Standoff or the Priv Remake possible today.
The
growth comes in aggregate when you take into account all the things Wing Commander fans have done for the last half decade. Someone saw Prophecy Advance, told their friends, they searched online and found their way here. And that got them online to play Flight Commander and Standoff, and that kept them interested long enough to play the Priv Remake and some of those people will stick around for WC Saga. At each step more people become aware of our community and join us because they know there is more to come. The privateer remake certainly made thousands of people aware of the Wing Commander community, but no one aspect of our universe can begin to take credit for overall growth. With each new project, we gain back a few more of the millions of Wing Commander fans that existed in the 1990s. Every wallpaper, video, article, clay model and adventure that fans go on each day keeps people interested. As more and more old fans learn of our community and see our continuous activity, they add to it and the population accumulates and snowballs. If we are dedicated to the community, it's up to each of us to be creative and find new ways to appreciate Wing Commander and share that with eachother. That is what we can credit our momentum with.