We can not talk about our sales openly atm, but I can tell you that we are here to continu the project and that it's doing well for the team. I already said earlier that the fourth previous month were better than our best year ever, and it was even before the Valley release, which I said was our best release ever. So, things are doing well and can only go better with release of demos, the presence of four environments, our ability to update the quality of Maniaplanet as a whole and the possibilities given to players to themselves bring new things around.
I believe that the down feeling of some players at the moment is mostly based on the presence of the free version of Nations, that had two things: free players + all players on the same environment. But there is still more people playing Canyon than all envionment of Sunrise at it's time, and the one before as well. There was more simultaneous players in Maniaplanet yesterday, than the paying Nations players, or the free ones. But we do not count them in a separate way, it's all part of the same community.
Alinoa said it well, the community is a wide thing: forums, offline / online games, custom titles, community web sites, creative players on ingame tools and external tools, players that like to come and play just a little sometimes, or a lot at releases. It is also a lot of people that like video games as a whole and see in Maniaplanet some gaming experience that widen the space of gaming: wider audience appeal of the settings in term of age, wider possibilities to create and share, wider appeal for competition in many cases etc.
Maniaplanet is big in many ways, not only in the software that is required to make all the features and that takes so long to do, but it's big in it's diversity as well. There is a need to fill each space with more players, and that's what we intend to do in the upcoming months, now that the space are there, in a better quality.
It's a project we are working on since more than five years. Expect us to try to make it a big success as much as possible. Like I already said earlier, we probably did the most popular racing game on PC, and our next step is to try to make the most popular FPS game on PC. It is totally normal that it takes time, the opposite would be just luck-based, while our work is think-based. And the more we work on them, the more it will be difficult for our competitors to reach what we did.
It is a very small beginning (courtesy of Magnetik)
