What future for Steel Panthers?

[bongo]

Steel Panthers (and his descendants) is certainly the most complete and the most successful of all times tactical wargame. The fact that an active community continues to play it and to develop it almost 20 years after its creation is the proof that it is well about « the wargame of the century » …

None of the games which tried to supplant it (Close Combat serie, HPS games, Heroes of Stalingrad and even the last project of Matrix Games) are not of its level.

However, we are all conscious that this designed game about 20 years ago with a DOS technology reached its limits in term of possible development of the game engine . The graphics are ageing, the interface is impractical and badly adapted to the current screen resolutions, it is almost impossible to play a multiplayer game without resorting to the PBEM, which is binding.
These difficulties reduce every day a little more the size of our community of enthusiasts.

Nevertheless, the enormous work of the volunteers who did not stop improving the program, the graphics, the scenarios and the campaigns cannot, does not, fall into oblivion little by little.

This game has to have a future …

What can he be?

4 ways are possible:

1 - The game disappear little by little, as so many others before it.
It would be an infinite sadness that to see disappearing slowly one of the most successful games which I was able to play in my career of wargamer.

2 - A development studio deals with the question and modernize the game to resell it in a box version (as the fact at present Matrix Games, for example).
Until now no studio looked interested to resume this game while, strangely, games more confidential were it.

3 - A community of passionate voluntary developers rewrite completely the program and redo all the graphics of the game. This one is distributed then free of charge (as it is the case today with WinSPMBT and WinSPWW2).
When we see all the work already realized by the enthusiasts of the community, we cannot imagine to ask them to supply with it even more free of charge.

4 - A mixture of the solutions 2 and 3 would be to raise funds through CrowFunding to motivate a development studio of to be worked in association with the current community to get back the existing and professionalize it.
It is at present a very fashionable solution to launch the project and that allows to make sure that a product will have a real commercial outlet by the implication of its future buyers. This solution would be totally adapted to a project such as that of the modernization of Steel Panthers. It would have the merit to preserve the enormous already made work and to enlarge the community of the enthusiasts by the attraction aroused by a modern look (There is only to see the success of Panzer Corps which is nothing else than a modernization of Panzer General, or the craze hallucinating on behalf of occasional players for games as World Of Tanks).
Because we are in the modernity, we could completely envisage a system of deployment of type Free To Play with paying contents to improve the gaming experience or the progress in the game.

I think that the best future which could arrive at Steel Panthers is this fourth solution. If we are enough to think of it, it will be sensible to count to know how many of us will be ready to invest in CrowFunding and how many others will be ready to pay for a modernized version of this game.

Please, give your point of view onto this crucial question.

(Sorry for my approximate English, I am French …)