CHANGES YOU THINK ARES/SGN SHOULD MAKE.

[Demiurgo]

Good morning gentlemen!

Kindly invited here by Diamondback, here I am.

First - I noticed your observations regarding our lack of presence on wargaming press.
I know our PR agent, Andrea F. (personally I think she does a nice job btw with our PR - given the limited resources she gets!) is regularly in contact with most of the hobby press we know of, but it is quite possible that there're magazines and such we are not aware of, or we do not have any good contact with.

So if you've got any suggestions on people we should be in touch with to get more exposure let me know! I appreciate your feedback a lot.
(And also remember the golden rule of press -- the more ads you buy, the more editorial attention you get :-( )

Re- Ares not being in touch with the community - you all know well that Andrea A. is a very regular presence almost anywhere he heards the words "Wings" or "Sails" on the net :-)
And we are regularly in touch with the Oberst himself and a few of the gentlemen here.
But honestly - we have limited time to read everything that's posted about us (reading this thread took me several hours, pushing back the release of a few dozens ships and planes by half a day :-) )
So I think I will nominate a couple of the guys here as our "official ambassadors", so we've got a presence in the community, in exchange for a lifelong supply of ships and planes ;-)

Re- the other suggestions. There's a lot of ideas, here. There are some things I personally agree with, but SoG is as much an "author" game as much as a product line, so some things are probably not going to happen because they are not wise to do at a manufacturing/marketing level (e.g. creating too many SKUs and secondary products for the line), some things may probably not happen because they conflict with the philosophy behind the design. But of course, nothing is written in stone, and whenever there are good ideas we can implement, we will look into them. But note that what is releasing now was planned many months ago... A product like Sails has a long development process, and any change will take months to show up in the actual products.
Some of the things you suggested WILL happen for sure, OTOH... for example, Victory and Constitution will feature Commander's cards and abilities.

Re asking for feedback from the community --- we've already got enough feedback to keep us going for the next five years :-) Seriously, we need to start turning a lot of good ideas gathered from the community into reality. A small example, is the fact that Spanish ships were not a priority in our mind until it became clear from our community that they were something people was really looking for, and we are fitting them as soon as we could in our schedule.

In any case, thanks a lot for your feedback, even for the parts not very kind to us. I guess that you have the perception - because of our beatiful games :-) - that Ares is be quite bigger than it is ... The common comparison in this thread (for good or bad) was with companies like FFG, Wizkids, and WOTC... companies greater than us by several orders of magnitude!
Unfortunately, we have limited human resources (even if step by step, we're growing) so I am sure that several areas of our operations will improve over time.