Wing Commander Petition

J

joel96

Spaceman
Before reading this thread, take a look at the thread called "Wing Commander Collectors Edition Box Set petition?"
I have written to EA before about re-releasing the series as a collection, but they did not reply. The following is similar to the first letter I wrote them, with the petition added to it.
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To the Development division of Origin,

This letter regards an Origin game series that established Origin as a leader in the interactive game industry: the Wing Commander series. The series has sold several hundred thousand copies and is one of the most critically acclaimed series of all time. The Wing Commander series has one of the largest and longest-lasting fan bases, with dozens of fan websites.

Unfortunately, the games are currently plagued with hardware incompatibility issues and software glitches, making the series nearly impossible to run on modern computers. The series is in need of repairs to hardware incompatibility issues, software updates, and support for current operating systems. The series’ programming code would be simple, easy, and affordable to fix compared to the complexity of Origin's most recent games.

Re-releasing the games together in a single "Collector's Edition" would be affordable and easy due to the increased capacity of the DVD format. The fan base is a large and viable market that will jump at the chance to buy such a re-release.

The following petition demonstrates the size of the potential consumer market, as well as how interested they are in a re-release.
The fan community and I are highly interested in the response Origin has to this idea, so let me know what Origin thinks of it.

Thank you for your attention,

[link to the petition host site will go here]
[name and e-mail address of the webmaster of the petition will go here]
Writer:
Joel Benedict
joeybuddy96@hotmail.com

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The Wing Commander Series Re-release Petition

To the development division of Origin [inc? ltd? co?]:
We, the undersigned, hereby petition Origin [inc, etc.] to meet the following requests:
**Re-release in the form of a single collection the following titles:
--[let me know the names for every title and expansion ever made relating to Wing Commander.]

**Re-release the above titles with an updated installation and setup interface intended for ease of use for the average computer user

**Include in said re-release DirectX support that will automatically detect sound and video cards, and offer support for peripherals, such as modern joysticks, gamepads, mice, and keyboards

**Adapt titles included in the re-release to be able to run under modern operating systems, such as Windows XP

**Repair any known or reported technical problems or glitches prior to re-release

**Re-release the above titles in the format of DVD-ROM or CD-ROM or both

**After re-release, offer technical support by telephone or e-mail

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[Section 3]
The above requests have been formulated and agreed upon by the following signers:

[names of the signers would go here]

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[An alternate way of sending this petition would be to have each individual signer e-mail EA the above petition. The following would replace what is within Section 3.]

The following electronic signature is one of many electronic signatures. The following signature represents that the signer below agrees with, and wholly supports the above petition and the requests contained therein.
[Name and e-mail address of the signer would go here. ]

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The previous thread shows there are at least a few people willing to sign on. Petitions have worked many times before. Sledge Hammer!, a TV show from the 80's, was released onto DVD after 20 years of being off the air because of a petition. Samurai Jack is another example of when petitions have been successful.
In order to get a petition started, a clear plan of action needs to be in place with regard to the method it will be sent and put together, and who will be the webmaster in charge of organizing a possible website and the signatures received. One way to set up the petition would be to have a website where petition signers would enter their name and e-mail. After a set amount of time, or after a set amount of signatures have been reached, the petition would be sent off to the company. Or, the website would just hold a counter to show how many people have signed it.
A method that may bring more attention would be to have signers copy and paste the petition into an e-mail document and send it to EA. This would mean EA's mailbox would fill up with dozens of e-mails with "Wing Commander petition" as the subject line.
I would like to get some views of others before anything gets started though. Let me know if you would like to change anything in the petition, including grammatical errors.
 
I think this is a really good idea. Definitely copy the text into a single e-mail each though and each send it. That way EA will get thousands of e-mails, not just one with a petition attached.
I like the text of your message, but will leave it to the experts here to define exactly what we'd like in the collection.
 
If there was ever a time to petition Electronic Arts, it was half a dozen years ago. In fact, it was done half a dozen years ago, and as with every online petition ever made, it didn't bring about the desired result.

The series has sold several hundred thousand copies
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The Wing Commander series has sold millions of games, not hundreds of thousands. EA doesn't make major games just to sell to sell a few hundred thousand units, and they also don't invest millions of dollars in a project because a couple thousand people express interest.

The following petition demonstrates the size of the potential consumer market
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That being said, there's never been a WC petition that could ever get more than a few hundred people to sign it, and as I said earlier, that's already been done, when the time was better, and it had no impact on EA's decision making process.

Unfortunately, the games are currently plagued with hardware incompatibility issues and software glitches, making the series nearly impossible to run on modern computers.
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You can run every single DOS/Windows game on a modern computer running Windows XP these days.

The series is in need of repairs to hardware incompatibility issues, software updates, and support for current operating systems. The series’ programming code would be simple, easy, and affordable to fix compared to the complexity of Origin's most recent games.
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What are some of these most recent games you're thinking of? There's a lot more to upgrading old Wing Commander games that I think you realize. In addition to all the extensive reprogramming necessary, there are marketing costs and support costs associated with any release.

To the development division of Origin [inc? ltd? co?]:
--let me know the names for every title and expansion ever made relating to Wing Commander.
Click to expand...

If you don't know the name of the company, or even where to find a list of games you're asking for, maybe you should step back and learn a little bit about what it is you're trying to do before investing yourself in what's supposed to be a major undertaking. Origin Systems Inc was purchased by Electronic Arts in 1992. EA has held the rights for more than thirteen years and will be the ones to decide when the next game is made. Real petitions are a lot more work than writing an email. Some of the serious petitioners are the people who've spent thousands of hours since the last WC game being excited about the series and investing time, money and effort in celebrating the series. It's through these actions that the powers that be will see there is genuine interest and continue the series at a later date.

Now, I say all this every time a new petition idea crops up. I've replied to this thread dozens of times before, and every time a bunch of people complain about how negative it sounds. It's exactly the opposite. I'm the most optimistic person there is. There will be plenty more Wing Commander games made in the future, but online polls and email petitions are not the way to bring them about.
 
If you want to do something to keep Wing Commander fandom alive and get EA's attention (however small, market researchers are supposed to look at people's behavior), then do something creative - participate in a project, open up a website, plaster your car with WC decals.
Creating and signing a petition (even a well-designed one) is in my eyes just a notion of "I like to be involved without being too much involved."
 
[/QUOTE] Some of the serious petitioners are the people who've spent thousands of hours since the last WC game being excited about the series and investing time, money and effort in celebrating the series. It's through these actions that the powers that be will see there is genuine interest and continue the series at a later date.

I'm the most optimistic person there is. There will be plenty more Wing Commander games made in the future, but online polls and email petitions are not the way to bring them about.[/QUOTE]

I certainly dont see any evidence to suggest that EA will ever make another Wing Commander game. What makes you think they will? It couldn't do any harm to get another petition up and running, could it?
 
MartySheen said:
I certainly dont see any evidence to suggest that EA will ever make another Wing Commander game.
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I've never seen a fox in the wild, but I know that they're there. Don't you?

MartySheen said:
What makes you think they will?
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As years pass, the chances of them returning back to a previously well-selling, well-known, critically acclaimed series goes up, not down.
 
MartySheen said:
I certainly dont see any evidence to suggest that EA will ever make another Wing Commander game. What makes you think they will?
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Some people think our history stopped at 1998, and that's not true at all. Lots of games get cancelled before they get released. There have been at least half a dozen serious pushes to create a new Wing Commander game since Secret Ops/Prophecy Gold. Privateer 3, Wing Commander Online and Privateer Online are just a few of them. Only one resulted in a published game (Prophecy Advance), but the will is there. EA still fiercely protects their IP when a site hosts Wing Commander 1, and they are currently digging back into their catalog with anthologies like C&C First Decade. When the market conditions are right, it'll be Wing Commander's turn.

MartySheen said:
It couldn't do any harm to get another petition up and running, could it?
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Petitions are one of those things that people's hopes up, and then invariably end up disappointing. And when you say "The following petition demonstrates the size of the potential consumer market," and only a dozen or two people sign it, that just looks bad. As I said above, the most successful petition done when the time was best suited for it only got a few hundred signatures. And e-signatures attached to some internet form letter are worth a lot less than real written letters, signed in ink and sent to EA headquarters. So yeah, I think actually taking every new petition idea seriously every couple months makes us look worse than we actually are. And that brings up another issue: every time someone creates a new petition, I have to wonder, where were they for the last six years when all the other petitions were created? If you show up here one day and think a petition is a great idea in 2006, you missed the boat. Did you sign the first petitions back in 2000? If there was ever a window of opportunity for something like this to have any chance of having an effect, that was it. Waiting until years after EA closed the Origin offices in Austin and the fan community is less focused is too late.

When EA wants to gauge market size, they'll look at how many daily visitors the various WC websites get, how many people post to WC message boards and how many people play WC fan games. These people who invest themselves day after day after day are much more representative of the market than anyone whose name you can attach to an email.
 
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LeHah said:
As years pass, the chances of them returning back to a previously well-selling, well-known, critically acclaimed series goes up, not down.
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Yes, look at lucasarts with sam and max - it was set too return and then they cancelled it again (when nearly completed too, but due too lucasarts deciding that the adventure game was dead or something) 10 years or more after the first, now that another company has picked it up and its going too be released by someone else maybe in episodic downloads.

There is always hope of another Wing Commander game, petitioning isnt going too get them too make another or a collection of the old titles, as i think someone said. it will be on market research, when space combat games start too come back as a popular genre again (which will happen one day i hope), EA would probably decide that it will be a lesser risk too take the financial plunge in producing a game, so they know they will make their money back on it.

When did EA last produce a space combat game of any kind, and when they did they probably looked at the market sales then and decided too focus on more popular genres - like sports and FPS.

Its not negative thinking... its realistic thinking, im sure EA gets tons of petitions and letters asking them or begging them too revive other titles but no where near the quanties too prove they will make a profit out of them. even if everyone here in the forum signed it- it would be no where near the amount they would predict selling at a time when space games arent particulary popular.

Its a nice thought though.

Vermin
 
Vermin said:
When did EA last produce a space combat game of any kind, and when they did they probably looked at the market sales then and decided too focus on more popular genres - like sports and FPS.
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It was the massively multiplayer Earth & Beyond which was launched in 2002. It was shut down after two years. Prior to its closure, EA went to great lengths to try to generate interest in the game. There were live fan events hosted around the country, and they even had an in-universe character call of former players on the telephone and invite them to come back for a free promotional period.

Vermin said:
Its not negative thinking... its realistic thinking, im sure EA gets tons of petitions and letters asking them or begging them too revive other titles but no where near the quanties too prove they will make a profit out of them. even if everyone here in the forum signed it- it would be no where near the amount they would predict selling at a time when space games arent particulary popular.

Its a nice thought though.
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Yeah, that's why we don't just lock petition threads. Discussing options for Wing Commander's future is part of the interaction that helps us.
 
Vermin said:
There is always hope of another Wing Commander game, petitioning isnt going too get them too make another or a collection of the old titles, as i think someone said. it will be on market research, when space combat games start too come back as a popular genre again (which will happen one day i hope), EA would probably decide that it will be a lesser risk too take the financial plunge in producing a game, so they know they will make their money back on it.

When did EA last produce a space combat game of any kind, and when they did they probably looked at the market sales then and decided too focus on more popular genres - like sports and FPS.

Its not negative thinking... its realistic thinking, im sure EA gets tons of petitions and letters asking them or begging them too revive other titles but no where near the quanties too prove they will make a profit out of them. even if everyone here in the forum signed it- it would be no where near the amount they would predict selling at a time when space games arent particulary popular.

Its a nice thought though.

Vermin
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Its sad that the space sim genre is largely ignored by all major games publishers these days, but I dont see that changing any time soon. I mean, why would it?

Surley the Earth&Beyond disaster has put EA off space games for life?
 
MartySheen said:
Its sad that the space sim genre is largely ignored by all major games publishers these days, but I dont see that changing any time soon. I mean, why would it?

Surley the Earth&Beyond disaster has put EA off space games for life?
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Not at all, things go in cycles. Turn based and more complex strategy games were completely dead for a while at the height of the real time strategy craze. Now they coexist quite well with other strategy games. It just takes a really successful one or two to get things jump started. Part of the reason that space sims fell off as a whole was because games like Freespace, Tachyon and Starlancer all sold so poorly, which immediately made publishers wary. Another reason was the lack of joystick peripherals on the market. They really went away about ten years ago. Games like Freelancer and E&B were an attempt to recover from that by going the mouse/keyboard route, but they didn't succeed. Now that consoles are doing so damn well, the controller route is very viable. I think we'll start to see more flying games in general do well on consoles, and ultimately this will branch out back into the space combat sim genre.
 
ChrisReid said:
Now that consoles are doing so damn well, the controller route is very viable. I think we'll start to see more flying games in general do well on consoles, and ultimately this will branch out back into the space combat sim genre.
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I actually thought wc4 worked very well with the PSX controler and rumble effects
 
AD said:
I actually thought wc4 worked very well with the PSX controler and rumble effects
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And there was even a special PSX joystick with a custom WC control scheme. One of my very first Wing Commander experiences was the SNES WC1, and it's amazing how much they were able to do with that controller. Modern controllers are going to be super for the next WC game.
 
I still think its the lack of joysticks that really make a new WC game an iffy proposition for EA.

I think it would be very neat if the next wing commander game came in a box set with its own joystick for about $75-90 it would solve both problems, and youc can't tell me most wingnuts wouldn't be willing to pay for a special edition game like that :D
 
NinjaLA said:
I still think its the lack of joysticks that really make a new WC game an iffy proposition for EA.

I think it would be very neat if the next wing commander game came in a box set with its own joystick for about $75-90 it would solve both problems, and youc can't tell me most wingnuts wouldn't be willing to pay for a special edition game like that :D
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Yea, I would love to see something like that come out. Id definately go for it and im sure the majority of the people here would also.

But, there are still some very nice flight controllers being produced. I recently got the Saitek X52 flight controller, it's pretty awsome. If im not mistaken there is a replica F16 flight stick available (or soon to be), so there are definately flightsticks out there for those who want them.
 
I played earth and beyond when the beta went public. Nice graphics etc, but I lost interest quickly. I didnt't like the fact that the computer aimed for me and decided which shots hit and didnt. Wing Commander style first person would win me over in a massive multiplayer. With the increased quality of internet connections and backbone bandwidth, latency issuse shouldnt be comming into it if something like Privateer Online comes around in the near future.

Its a shame Prophecy didn't have network capabilities, that would be fun. nice to see this armada patch and id like to have a go online with it, but for some reason it doesnt run too good on dosbox for me, as soon as I get a couple of ships on screen, or I get pallet flashes from weapon hits, my fps visibly drops and aiming gets too difficult.

Ijuin said:
I use the keyboard to fly in WC, and do quite well that way, thank you. :p
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I used the mouse to aim with Privateer 2, for some reason my joystick would never calibrate to the centre, the little dot would always be off centre. Whenever I pulled the joystick back to move up, I would start by going down.
 
I love wing commander and I had my wife send me one of my joysticks so I could play special ops and stand off. I will be all for it if it comes maybe buy 2 copies and keep on as a spare :D
 
i would love to see a WC reproduction, but i honestly dont see it happening. I played WC 3,4, Prophecy and secret ops with an old "Top Gun" joystick, i now have a cheapo flight stick so i could play free space and Mechwarrior. I just wish someone would come up with a joystick mod for freelancer
 
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