Dedicated Wingnuts Need Your Votes

Voting continues 10th annual CIC Fan Project & Web Site of the Year awards! A few nominees in each category have come out with early leads, but it's still anyone's game. Head to the voting page to cast your ballot. Winners will be announced late this weekend! Here are the nominees again:

Fan Projects of the Year

• Ascii Sector announced that it will eventually be spun off into its own universe, but currently continues to get frequent bug fixes and impressive game updates.
• Astro Commander's Mini Models. The base 3d printed designs are available to order, and Astro's painted fleet is amazing.
• elend's Banshee is full of gorgeous detail and is one of the finest Wing Commander models ever made.
• Lin Kuei Ominae's Privateer 2 Editor wowed P2 fans with its plethora of customizable options and breathed new life into the Tri-System.
• Mincemeat's Superpatch fixes a host of lingering Windows compatibility issues and even works with the WC1 release.
• sol_hsa's DirectDrawHack program also works with the recent WC1 release, but instead of getting the games working, this program beefs up the graphics of Windows based WC games.

Web Sites of the Year

• Frontier Prelude to Darkness is a Wing Commander-inspired animated movie with a website that's constantly updated with status updates, behind-the-scenes bonuses and special features.
• HCl's Wing Commander Editing Site relocated to Solsector this year, and HCl continues to pump out dazzling Wing Commander hacks and extractions.
• Paper Commander had a big year with five fun new paper ships to build.
• WC Saga continues to post new updates about the pending release of 'The Darkest Dawn'.
• Wedge's Wing Commander is about as reliable a source of Wing Commander info as you can find anywhere on the internet.
• Wing Commander Tactical operations has both a web presence for its offline games and a budding test environment for its exciting online version.

EA Predicts Downloads Beating Retail in 2011

The free-to-play model has been a huge boon for EA. Riccitiello noted, "Our highest ARPU (average revenue per user) are free-to-play games among paying users. You think about that and say, 'how can a free game be the game they pay the most for?' We have people who are giving us $5,000 in a month to play FIFA Ultimate Team. And it’s free. Dirty little secret."

The key for publishers is to be flexible, he added. "I actually don’t think that there’s a lot of mileage in trying to decide exactly how consumers want to buy their entertainment content. They may want to buy it on an iPad; they may want to get it through the social network, they may want to pay for it through micro-transactions and monetizing, or they may want to pay for it all at once. They may rather pay a subscription price in order to count on what their costs are going to be, but they may want to pay for it all at once and never have to pay for it again. We’re in all of those businesses and I think the way this is going to work is that the models that the consumers like the most are going to grow the most," Riccitiello said.