I disagree somewhat with this "what fans want / what fans need" dichotomy. If the fans are unhappy, they're unhappy -- period. If a lot of fans are unhappy, you're doing something wrong. If they know why they're unhappy, perhaps you should listen to them -- they might be right!
Yeah, sometimes fans think they want something, and when they get it, it turns out it's not what they wanted (or it turns out it's what they wanted and nobody else did). But that doesn't apply to everything.
Yeah, but you know what's the only thing important to determine if your fans are happy or unhappy? SALES NUMBERS.
If alot of fans are unhappy, but they're not the fans you want to keep/sell to, you're actually doing everything right.
I work for a major German newspaper & magazin publishers in market analysation. Our analyses decide with publications gets canned and which gets pushed, and we have a lot of publications under our wings. All data we need to decide the fate of a publication is the sales vs. the expenses of producing it. And you know what? That's enough to decide which covers to use and which storylines to run. Did you know that in Germany putting a really blonde girl onto the cover of a mid-class woman illustration directly translates into a loss of sale? Or that publications with tv-programmes sell best if the background of the cover's blue? Or that we can even predict sales of a gossip mag based on the kind of story run? Even the quality of the writing doesn't matter much, unless its really abhorrend or absolutly excellent - and both extremes are hard to hit.
Do you think anybody has written us and went "hey, I like your blue covers better"? Nope. All of this knowledge is encompassed in the sales data. You've "just" gotta do some data-mining. (which, incidentially, pays my rent. :3)
We do not even see the letters and forumposts of our readers for those analyses. And in the end, they don't matter much, you know, unless there's a huge outrage or a huge thank you regarding a story/cover/whatever - and those are marked by being unusual cases. In 99% reader opinion's just background noise. You've got those constantly outraged (ignore them in your analysis), you've got those always kissing your feet (ignore those too) and the majority that doesn't care about you and just pick up your stuff because it's convient or a habbit and you got their attention at the right time and/or were quicker than your competitors.
I'm pretty sure Archie watches its sales numbers in a similiar way, modified by by the proportions of direct sale vs subscriptions and how much money they can spent on datamining - they need to if they want to survive.
And by now I'm pretty sure that the "It's not SatAM!" crowd is square deep in the "constantly outraged, appeasing them would cost more money than it would bring in" bucket. It's just bad form for a company to tell people that.
Those cute fluffy covers with bright colours and cute scenes that caused such an outrage in this topic? They're actually very well done - they will make parents pick up the mag for the children (doubly so if they recognize them as characters from a game they trust) and more importantly, they make children go and beg their parents to pick it up for them. We go for a similiar cover design in our childrens mags. One in a hundred pickups might lead to a sub for a year or two, who knows. It's a gamble. One fact is that if you change something about a publication, you WILL lose customers. The question's just: Will you gain more than you lose?
Maybe it'll work out for Archie, maybe not - but you can be sure they can see it in their sales numbers. But I've seen how quickly publications get canned - often from one issue to the next - and considering that the comic's still running, it must be still worth for them.
