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Thread: Oh Money! I like Money!

  1. #1
    Member
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    Mar 2013
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    North Vancouver, BC, Canada
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    Oh Money! I like Money!

    Thought you might be interested...


  2. #2
    Insider
    Join Date
    May 2012
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    1,182
    Thought provoking, as always.

    I feel like there is a disconnect to a certain extent between those people with the mindset that paintball, and speedball particularly, is a sport.

    Not to get all hifalutin on you, but I think of the health of the paintball industry as a series of growth and retention steps that look something like this:

    1: introduction to paintball

    2: conversion to a regular player

    3: conversion to speedball player

    4: conversion to tournament player

    5: reasons for quitting: burnout, financial, etc


    So, I often feel like a lot of people are still curious about paintball and will try it with essentially the same frequency as ever. Groupon might even help.

    However I truly believe that since 2006, the preponderance of ramping guns and decline in quality of paint has led to the initial playing experience becoming, for lack of a better term, less addictive. We need to hook in those grouponers and say, hey, this is what paintball really is, this is why it's fun, this is why we choose to play. In other words, our rate constant from step 1 to step 2 is bad.

    Making matters worse is that our step 2 to step 3 conversion is bad. I generally like a well executed woodsbsll game, but lord, that format is hard to nail, it reeally is. It's do easy for a field layout to just create horrible stagnation as soon as more than a few players are on at a time. I appreciate that guys like to do milsim stuff, and often those are the guys with money to back it up, but from the perspective of a sport? Speedball is a great mix of teamwork, athleticism, and cunning.

    I think that a combination of lessons, improved paint, lower rof, and better stewardship of new speedball players would have a significant impact on getting players to steps 3 and 4 (granted this is a simple and imperfect model.)

    One thing I really like about lessons is that if provides a source if revenue for local establishments that can't be undercut by the Internet. Hopefully that would suppress the impetus to try to sell lots of paint, which I think probably goes hand in hand with the ramping thing.

  3. #3
    Member
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    Mar 2013
    Location
    North Vancouver, BC, Canada
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    Totally! You spelled it out so simply by breaking down the steps for a player's evolution. Bang on.

    In doing the research for this vlog, I started to see something that you just mentioned. The race to the bottom for price meant the race to the bottom in quality of the hardware and the experience.

    The biggest insight I had was talking on MCB about the difference in price between Canada and the USA. In Canada the price is $160 to $200 a case for Recball. On speedball fields run by players for practice its the "normal" price of $45 to $65.

    In talking about the price it was noted that the fields in Canada - in general - "look better". Then a few field owners of Canadian fields mentioned that the price of paintballs in Canada never got caught up in the "race to the bottom". As such, the field owners have money to spend on upgrades and upkeep. Which is completely logical.

    But! here is the kicker, the fields in Canada have a lot of customers. I know my "home" field gets sold out at 125 people almost every weekend. Vancouver has 6 fields...including one indoor field that incurs a high cost of operation.

    Its all very interesting. I want to quantify this to see if the stats and facts back this up. Its hard because there are no stats for participation by country, state or province...again another thing that needs to get sorted if paintball wants to "grow up"...man I could go on and on....

    Anyways, Im going to pick on this for the next few weeks and see what "truths" I can find in the stats and facts.....

  4. #4
    Awesome video and very thought provoking.
    BigEvilOnline.com - Home of the bad, bad automag people.

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