Where is the next great thing coming for paintball?

[Alpha]

Paintball is going to hit a brick wall if companies liek Smart Parts keep going the way their going.

[WARPED1]

The LTD Gear laser trigger. It will be awesome.

[BigEvil]

Sorry about the looooong post

Hey!!! Steal my idea will ya?? LOL

Here is my take. (as if anyone cares)


Profit obviously drives any industry. Right now, unless you are the flavor of the month, your company probably isnt selling a whole lot of product.

I would imagine, that if that were my company, I would look to do something to improve sales and keep the cash rolling in so my wife will keep having sex with me and I could still support my $300 a month habit (paintball hehe)

With that said, a few 'quick' fixes could be tried.
1- ad campain. Get back in peoples faces and get them talking about your stuff.
2- repackage what you are making. Change a little code in the CnC program and alter some minor milling, and now you have changed the 04 model to the 05 model. Of course, it has HAWT new featiures, such as (Insert hype here) You get the idea.

Those sort of things will work for a while IF you have a halfway decent product that the market still likes. (IF not, your screwed - probably going to have to switch to the scenerio market or something like that). WIth TONS and TONS of similar products out there all competing for the same peice of the pie, probably interest in you product will die down once some else comes up with something shinier.

But for the long term, you are going to have to thing big. Not "ok, lets go change the paint back to .62 caliber' big, but big enough were you come up with something that is not recyclled and is totally new and inovative.

Also, something that people dont laugh at.

The question is : "How the hell does someone do that?"

Ponder the thought of trying to come up with something completly new for a little while. Something marketable, and something that you could realistically produce and make a profit off of.


Scary isnt it?

Make me appreciate guys like Ben Tippman, Glenn Palmer, and Tom Kay all the more.

But im sure at some point each of them sat down and looked at what was available, evaluated it, and tried to figure out what would make things better.

Palmer probably had one too many blisters from pumping his Sherridan. NExt thing you know, we have a Semi-automatic paintball gun.

Tom Kaye wanted to build a gun that worked reliably, so he wiped the slated clean, ditched the blow back idea, and came up with blow forward. Soon the first Automags were hitting the field. If you have never seen it, watch the original tape that came with the Automag. Its great stuff.

Then he saw how his gun didnt like CO2. Viola - the idea of powering a paintball gun with nitro/compressed air was born.

See my point? What do we as paintballers REALLY need that would improve the game so much as to be revolutionary? Where are the shortcomings in our equipment?

Truthfully... there arent many.

They shoot fast. They do not break paint. They are easily maintaned, and chronoed. We can easily feed over 25 bps from our hoppers. Where else do we go from here?

The only real thing that sucks right now.. it that you have to pay alot for a good peice of paintball equipent. And to tell the truth.. a $280 e-marker that has breakbeams and ramp is a step in the right direction. Anyone remember how Brass Eagle put out the Stingray as the first semi-auto for under $300? People bought them just to check them out, simply becasue they were so affordable. SOund familiar? Soon after, other manufacturers caught on and got competative. SPyders hit the scene.. and the affordable semis were here to stay.

Competition drives all of these things. Right now I do not see any REAL competition out there. Yes, there are TONS of products out, and yes you can get them for differnet prices on the retail level, But what many do not realise is that the mark ups are SOOO RIDICULOUSLY LOW on PB gear that its almost not worth getting into the busisness. Also, another real problem, is that there is really only one or two major distributors. Those are the guys with the power. Also, most of the smaller companied are being bought up and merged with larger companies.

SO basically, your 'talent pool' of creativity is low, your NEED for something better is low, and the desire to spend the dollars and make the effort is low.

Throwing a few starving patent lawyers into the mix certainly doenst help does it?

[mandatory]

Cheating punks are turning a lot of experienced players away from the game, and makes it hard for newbies to get into it as well

I agree. Im on the newbie side of things. I have been playing for about 2 years, but only hard core ( once or twice a week) for about 6 months. Im very competitave and have alot of expierence playing competitive sports at the higher levels. Obviously i am going to be attracted to the fast pace, high energy tournament style of play. I can honestly say that i am hooked. But i am very turned off by the attitude of most of the tournament players. Cheating and the glorification of those who cheat bummes me out. The "my gun is the best and your gun sucks" arguments that i hear every day at the field are getting old and annoying. It seems like alot of tournament style players are about "alienation" rather than "cohesion". If something or someone they are not familiar with comes around, they usually react by pushing that idea or person as far away from them as pissible. I would like to see a more open community, like this one, rise out of the tourny scene, so that all the problems with cheating and "bad" attitudes will be easier to dicuss and debate, locally and industry wide.

SO basically, your 'talent pool' of creativity is low, your NEED for something better is low, and the desire to spend the dollars and make the effort is low.

If this is so, which i agree that it is so, then why are people offering to upgrade you mag to an electronic terror (devilmag, logic-mag, hypermag, ect) if its not economicaly benificial to them, alot of stress and work, and thay are unable to get them out in a timely, customer satisfying manner?? It seemes like the guys who are building these guns are doomed befor they even start. then you have people like me, who are new to the sport and get sucked into "hype" very easly, who trust what these gun makers tell them, send them their only gun and $720, and then get quite unhappy when the sh@t hits the fan and the gun goes into the "it gets done when its done" phaze. Now it seems to me like the process in which single guys offer a service, which is easly and readily avalible to purchased by the customer (just a click away), but very difficulte to make and to get done on time is just set up to have a back ups and delays. did they not see this type of thing comming??? It just seems a little selfish that their system puts no pressure on themselves to produce the parts in accordance with any reasonable deadline. Any deadline would be great, even it it was a 6 month deadline, that would at least stop the "whens my gun going to be done" question. to make your customers wait without bound is not a good way to run a business. But i guess thats the way business goes, get away whith what ever you and get away with, step on who ever you need to step on. Which is why i will never enter into business for myself.

[Mr. Mouse]

next big thing in paintball will probabley be scenario games, i mean ya speedball and the media is growing and such but everyone loves big games like 500 on 500 people, i mean you have pball tanks and everything so i think besides speedball and the pretty colors and cameras and fame, i think the next big thing is going to be scenarios, i mean dont get me wrong speedball wont die but the next popular thing to come is going to be scenarios

[WARPED1]

Scenario games have been around about 15-20 years now. Not going to be "the next big thing".

[BigEvil]

Scenario games can be fun, but more often than not they are very poorly run. Iv'e just about given up on them.

There are lots of players who adapt the 'scenario mentality' over the 'speedball mentality'. Even though the style of play has been around, the market is still new and growing. People love their mil-style guns.

[master_alexander]

seems like alot of threads are turning into this, but i had a thought.

some of the guys that know the sport really well have decided to go back to the scenario/rec scene. i read in another thread that the phantoms are sold out or close to selling out on the internet. new players are coming in and more or less taking over. demand for faster lighter guns are coming out. the ion has been the new wave.

i was held down for a whole game of capture the fort (i play rec for now) because some kid with his new ion just pinned me down with about 3 other guys. i didn not shoot more than 10 balls that game. granted my z grip sometimes is not good in thoes positions but they would not do too good if everyone used semis.

(going back to the expierenced players) you know how the clothing styles and the hair styles are coming back in the young population of america? i think that most of the expierenced players will go back to using semis and pumps (phantoms are out of stock to proove it) and then most players enter by doing woodsball.

and for the people that do like the sport enough, they will get a hign end electro (or an ion..) and join the fast pace game of speedball.

[PumpPlayer]

The next "big thing" will be a good loader.

Think about your options now. For a decent loader you've pretty much got the Halo, egg, Q-Loader or the revvy. There's not much more out there.

Not one of those loaders really does the job well! The Halo is HUGE, takes a mess of batteries to power it and is even more finnicky than most electros out there. Plus it's darn expensive, especially if you want to up the performance with the cheetah or other board. The Q-loader's neat, but it's a lot bulkier than it should be, has that nasty 100-round capacity and won't fit in a standard harness. It's got a niche following that loves it, but it's a poor alternative for the masses. The egg isn't much of a loader either. The low-end of the force-fed systems, it seems to suffer from the same faults the Halo does, just on a lower scale. The revvy, IMO, is your best choice as far as reliability goes, but it's just too slow for modern markers.

A good loader is going to kick some serious tail when it goes on the market. Something light, low profile, fast and that doesn't take a whole mess of batteries. And if they can get it under $100, everyone will buy one. I'm just disappointed in my options currently and I'm hoping we see a decent loader in the next few years.