Mr. Curious Again

Over at John Amodea's (new) blog, (welcome to the new media, John) he began a series of posts that are, in part, a retrospective of the history of paintball. I recommend anyone interested in the current state of the game check John's blog out. So many involved in the game today know amazingly little about what came before which makes it all the more ironic that some of the peeps most in need of John's review are the ones who made that history.

The broad strokes of the post are unassailable but donning my Mr. Curious personae, which requires only an expression of wonderment mixed with confusion--and not a great personal stretch--I am curious about a couple of things in John's post. I wonder what gun sales were in say, 2000 or 2001 compared to 2008. I also wonder what impact the burgeoning market in almost new virtually identically performing used guns is having on new sales particularly during an economic downturn. I'm also curious about the real impact of media and industry focus on the tourney side in recent years (and the varied effort over the last couple years to reintroduce recreational paintball into the pages of most of the magazines.) I have no doubt that poor local field operation has been exacerbated by punks with blazing gats and alienated some numbers of newbies but were these ever players interested in rec and/or woods ball? And have these assumed losses impacted the numbers of rec/woods players? Lastly, did anyone expect the explosive growth of the early part of this decade to go on endlessly? (Well, doh, some parts of PBIndustry clearly did but still ...)

In any event it's great to have multiple voices and more venues in which to discuss this wretched game called paintball.