Kee Buys Kingman!!

[steadian]

Swiped this from pbnation:

http://www.pbnation.com/showthread.php?t=4037674

Not sure if this means they purchased the company as a whole but they did purchase the product line

thoughts? and i wonder who will be next.....

[Mercenario]

Hmm...

[going_home]

Has anyone but new players ever taken Kingman seriously when it comes to their markers ?

Tippmans and Spyders seem to dominate the new player market.

Past that stage Spyders are basically off the scene, while you still see a lot of woods players with nicer more upgraded Tippmanns.

Wonder why Kee bought Kingman ?

[steadian]

I never considered that, maybe they are trying to get a bigger chunk of the entry level players, or maybe its over 50 cal, or maybe the erasers where proving to be competition for the splatmasters? hard to say

[FirePro84]

I doubt that the KT stuff was what did it, I have a feeling that a great deal of it was due to wanting a bigger chunk of the entry level market, I have a feeling that their BT line of markers isn't doing as well as they had hoped vs their Tippmann counterparts so they want to own the other competing entry level markers, that being the spyder line.

Tippmann dominates the rental scene for fields, but I think spyder does quite a bit of business in entry level sales just because they sell the Victor and Xtra at $60 and $85 basically ready to go. just add tank/hopper/mask and you're set. the tippmann counterpart was the 98 custom which was longer and heavier and cost $120 retail and you still had to add tank/mask to that.

With KEE dropping their ER3 line (which personally we sold WAY more ER3's than we did Spyders in our shop) I think they wanted something to fill that void that would ultimately be tried and true and cheap for the consumer. be honest, the brand name does carry a lot of weight, most people who have not played paintball or only played once or twice still recognize the names spyder and tippmann pretty quickly.

My other thought is that they wanted the low end .50 cal market, possibly to try and market it to fields as a cheaper more friendly (less painful) way to introduce new players to the sport...just a thought.

This is all speculation mind you...just some ramblings of mine...

[rampantsanity]

i've been playing awhile and i push Spyders to new players so they can get the skills before they get the cash into it.

since i happen to currently run a modified Spyder MRX in magfed configuration, i'll be paying close attention to whether they kill my marker line or not.


in the mean time, i'll be working on a couple drop in Automag engine conversions to magfed. mostly for kicks.

i'm thinking that i need to do a true bullpup (that will teach them to mess with my marker line) and an SMG design. The Automag engine is a prime system for that.