I ask this question because as it stands now, it doesn't seem that way. The only way our community can get past the luring newbies in followed by implicit newbie-bashing on the SB.com forums, cobrabase's ripping off dpabrams' mission (who did not give him permission to release the modified mission as his own), dpsbrams himself being a jerk to someone pointing out how a topic is starting to break a rule, and elitist comments on Rock Paper Shotgun articles falsely implying that interest is always correlated with monetary commitment (if that were so, browser games would not exist) is if the simulator receives far more attention and the new players that come with it, so that the coffee clique culture is broken as more people stand up against this bad behavior, and if necessary create their own separate general SB communities that treat people right, or migrate to the VU communities to make them even more relevant.
This just isn't going to happen without the current marketing director and future director of eSim Games Deutschland GmbH going out of the picture and being replaced, or us taking our own action. Those of you who remember me in my far less mature days will know that there's bad blood between me and Ssnake, but in recent months he's managed to drive me up the wall even when I've made a conscious effort to avoid interacting him for the past 3 years. Whether he's falsely accusing KITT of racism (how could KITT be racist if he was referring to a political group, rather than an ethinic group? It's possible he did just that, but he wasn't specific, so we don't know what he meant), screaming at rasputin for try to be helpful by finding something Ssnake could have found in 10 seconds with Google, getting defensive at Apocalypse31 for requesting a little more love for the non-military opportunities (most of the time we're still getting no love compared to his precious military contracts, by his own figures of 5-10% sales for Pro PE, that still means 90-95% for the military contracts), oozing butthurt in the "The new graphics engine" topic that he has to change his precious engine (he puts out so much of it in his tone that you can taste it), and acting xenophobic toward any business opportunities outside of his beloved military contracts, it's clear that this sim will never be relevant even within a genre that's bordering on irrelevancy as long as this xenophobic manchild is in charge of resales and driving forum lurkers away from our passion, and as long as we stand by and say nothing. Which is why I'm speaking up here, where Ssnake is present but has no cronies he can depend on and no sheep to be bludgeoned into sycophancy with tl;dr rants. (And for those of you who remember my last post on the SB.com forums, I'm a man of my word, which is another reason I'm posting this here)
This peerless simulator deserves a wider audience, xenophobia about COD kiddies aside, and it's time we realized and acted on this reality: Since we have no control over pricing and eSim Games' own marketing of Steel Beasts Pro PE, it's time we "Ask not what marketing eSim Games can do for us, ask what marketing we can do for eSim Games."
P.S. Ssnake's spreading of technical misinformation, such as declaring the K in Intel Core ix-xxxxK processors to designate quad cores in daskal's system requirements topic, and implying that Shader Model 3.0 made its debut with DirectX 11 (it made its debut with DirectX 9.0c) doesn't help his case either. If I were Al Delaney, I would be concerned about his technical knowledge.