What the hell did I miss?

[Jaan]

Is it just me or does paintball seem to be getting more disposable?

I think all of society is getting more and more disposable. Even things like bicycles are designed now with planned obsolescence. It's great though if you don't need to get the latest and greatest and can live with something a couple of years old (c:

[JimmyBeam]

i dont get this. how can people justify getting everything they put into a gun and not lose alot for depreciation. you buy a new car, drive it off the lot and loose alot of what the cars worth right there. theres no way you can keep a gun for a couple years, and turn around and expect to get what you paid out of it. exfcept maybe AKA and xmag owners.

new guns come out, yours becomes outdated. deal with it. and with more and mroe models and guns coming out each year, its just going to get worse. sell it, cut your loss as much as possible and move on.

[TheTramp]

The only way to break even with a high end gun these days it to trade it for another high end gun IMHO.

Of course even there you'll get screwed if you're going after the flavor of the month.

[ultralight]

i dont get this. how can people justify getting everything they put into a gun and not lose alot for depreciation. you buy a new car, drive it off the lot and loose alot of what the cars worth right there. theres no way you can keep a gun for a couple years, and turn around and expect to get what you paid out of it. exfcept maybe AKA and xmag owners.

new guns come out, yours becomes outdated. deal with it. and with more and mroe models and guns coming out each year, its just going to get worse. sell it, cut your loss as much as possible and move on.

i agree with the idea that the price should depreciate some after a few years but markers are (should be) nothing like cars or boats. cars and boats lose value because using them puts alot of wear and stress on them. paintball markers (well, markers built with quality materials) are more like firearms or tools in that as long as they are taken care of they will not wear out nearly as fast as a well taken care of car or boat. my biggest gripe with the marker to car analogy is that cars are made to wear out and the better quality markers are not... yet. let's hope they don't catch on.

[ShooterJM]

Market saturation.

[TheTramp]

Tom predicted a year ago that it would soon be almost not worth it to try and sell off old equipment. For the price you'd get you'd rather just let it sit in your closet.

[drg]

Dragun also happened ...

[Southparkrocks]

Resale pwnt

[Mr. Mouse]

all the hype in electronic markers and upgrades and electronic boards better off keeping the cocker, your not the only one whose brought this up

[tyrion2323]

I left paintball for a couple years because I had no money and I try to sell my cocker that I could have easily got $500-$600 for a couple years ago, and now I'm told I will probably only get $300-350 and it has over $1000 worth of stuff into it, thats not even half of what I paid. So What the hell happened? E-Bladed Free Flows almost brand new, for $575, when back then you could get about $1000+ easy? Oracles for $300. 2k2-3 angels for $400-500. I'm in awe at the amount of value these incredible markers have lost. I thought my cocker would retain some kind of value, but the resale is worse than a brass eagle gun, is brass eagle even in business anymore? What great advancements in marker technology have been discovered that these sweet *** guns are nearly worthless? This saddens me that all the cool guns I always wanted and would have paid $1200+ for if I had the money, are now not worth as much as stock cocker was a few years ago. I guess that this is good, it makes really nice guns more affordable, but that means no matter what you buy you are going to have a great loss if you sell it, and if you upgrade, good luck, its as if upgrading is out of style now and that was my favorite part of paintball. But I guess that when I get my job and get back into paintball I get a nice selection of those cool guns I always wanted for a fraction of the price...

Resale for autocockers has been declining quickly for years now, before the Ion has been around. Certainly the Ion has helped further that along; however, Ions are not the sole reason, as some would like to claim.

There are many reasons that your cocker doesn't hold its value...

- better technologies have been produced
- cheaper technologies have been produced
- smaller, lighter and faster technologies have been produced
- less complicated, more reliable technologies have been produced

I don't know why you're complaining - did you really expect to sell your old gun and buy a new one with the money? Sounds like your cocker is pretty cool, which makes me believe that perhaps you should keep it, or work on something with it....

just some thoughts.

[Chris42050]

Hey at least you didn't get suckered into buying an Angel. I bought an Angel a few years ago for a fortune and its still a great gun that works perfect for me, but its worthless if I ever tried to sell it. Wish I had just waited a couple of years and bought a used one. I will never buy a new gun again, especially an Angel. Thier resale is the worst.

[Linkwarner]

Wanna sell your angel?..... I know I would buy it!!

[Doc Nickel]

The Ion was just another nail in the coffin.

The resale of used markers started to die several years ago, when the first semi-decent seartrippers came out, and about the same time, WDP started making "in-house custom" markers.

When the Angel first came out, you got either a stock black one from the factory, or you bought one of a rare few aftermarket customs like the Adrenalins. Eventually they started offering their own milling and anno, which was recieved well by customers. So well, that they kept accellerating the release pace- it used to be you got one "custom" flavor per year, nowadays you have a dozen or more to pick from.

NPS and Bob Long saw this and copied it with the Intimidator line. First it was "Bob Longs Intimidator", then it was the Ironman, then more and more- Aliases, Naughty Dogs, Russian Legion, GZ, ad nauseum.

All basically the same gun inside (with the only real difference being changes in the circuit board) but each looked "new" and "cool" on the outside.

This started getting the kids used to the marketing-101 concept of "New Is Better". Your six-month-old ABC Intimidator is obsolete now that we've brought out the new XYZ Intimidator!

Guns that had been used for barely two tourneys were being dumped for whatever they'd sell for, so the owners could go out and pick up the newest, coolest, hottest version of the same gun, lest they be ridiculed at the field. (You think that last part is a joke, don't you?)

NPS, WDP, WGP and even Kingman are also all ramping up overall production. Besides the demand for 'newer/cooler/better' there's also the growth of the market overall- which, unfortunatley, has the inevitable side effect of producing thousands and thousands of players who have bought new gear, played twice, and then decided to quit for whatever reason.

So you have a market in classic saturation conditions. Hardware is being manufactured at ever-faster paces, and being sold off as used even faster. The marketing geniuses lean on the idea that anything older than three months ago is obsolete and worthless, and the kids redouble their turnover. To fuel the increased demand, the manufacturers keep rereleasing the same old junk with new colors, new milling, new names and calling it "innovative".

And finally, throw into this mix a new series of markers pretty much as good as any of the "high end" guns, but at the fraction of the price, and flood the market anew. The timing of this new flood coming when the market as a whole is slowing slightly, is simply coincidential.

And what do you get? "Old" guns like slide-trigger, right-feed 'Cockers are almost worthless, bringing less than $100, even when sold with plenty of major accessories (barrels, loader, inline regs, etc.) "Older" Angels like the LCD bringing $200 only if the board has been replaced, and LEDs being so cheap they're being traded for pumps or parted out. Early Intimidators, despite selling like the proverbial hotcakes when first released, are derided as "ugly" and "slow" and worth almost nothing unless upgraded with a new grip frame and LPR assembly.

E-Spyders being numerous and almost worthless, 'Shoebox' Shockers being given away, anything non-electro being almost unsalable.

What will it do to the market and the sport? Good question. Right now, it's a buyers market, with nearly-new equipment available by the truckload for cents on the dollar. Except the average players' mindset is that anything "old" is obsolete and therefore worthless. Peer pressure alone reduces the purchasing of used equipment by new and old player alike.

The current boom is a boon for the makers- they're selling every Shocker, Intimidator and Angel that can be made right now. But it can't, and more importantly won't, last. Eventually players will start to wonder why they're buying a $1,200 Intimidator when a $300 Ion works just as well, and for that matter, so does a $200 used E-Blade. These companies will find it harder and harder to sell the high-dollar guns, which will more and more be reserved for the sponored teams.

Where once a dealer could stock a solid dozen "different" Intimidators, eventually only two or three can be had, as there will be no demand for more.

Will the loss of high-profit 'high end' sales be offset by larger numbers of the lower-profit markers, a'la the Wal Mart marketing scheme? Perhaps, but that requires ever-larger numbers of new players and players replacing old equipment. That, too, is a concept that can only be sustained for just so long before it, too, collapses.

And the market is already showing signs of slowing. Double-digit growth is down to single digits in places, and in others, expected sales have not materialized.

This is our "dot com bubble".

Doc.

[ultralight]

i love your posts.

[Aliens-8-MyDad]

another great post from doc. and everything he said is Exactly true. thanks for taking my scatterd thoughts and putting them into something that I understand better. although I must say it sucks that paintball companies are doing this. It seems like no ones in it for the game anymore, just profits and hype.