If you'll recall, as a result of the Battle Sprite update, Spiral Knights saw a fairly significant surge in active players during August 2013. I won't quote the exact numbers I've seen, but it was fairly significant for this game.
The trouble is, the numbers from August to September 2013 dropped rather precipitously.
I'm sure part of that was the natural subsiding of interest from new and returning players, but it's also very likely that releasing a major update just weeks before students were heading back to school was a disaster waiting to happen.
The Battle Sprite update was a summer blockbuster that was released just as the summer was coming to an end, and from a strategic marketing standpoint, that was a mistake.
Any momentum that the update might have created was suddenly lost due to the start of the school year.
So as you can see, releasing the Gunner Update during the middle of the school year would have been a mistake. It would have fallen flat had it been released to a limited audience.
The Gunner Update is a summer blockbuster; it needs the proper exposure and the largest audience available. And like a summer blockbuster, it needs time to sink its claws into an audience full of repeat and returning customers.
So be patient with OOOs. I feel confident they're going about this the right way.
I'm not sure that you're right. Maybe it would be better to release content during the lulls, rather than during the surges? I don't know.
Anyway, I love that you have tried to see the progress of the game from Three Rings' point of view. So many players around here just expect massive content to arrive for free at a rapid rate. You're trying to understand how developing and releasing content affects the business, on which the game relies. Excelsior.