Tuesday, June 9, 2009

The Revolution Begins

If there were any doubters left this should serve to dispell those doubts. Pete, under the name GIMILSIM, has posted the opening salvo. Read it and weep or read it and rejoice. Either way, it's coming.
(I told you so.)
(Couldn't resist.)

16 comments:

Reiner Schafer said...

"The new era of 50 calibre paintball means cheaper paint for the paintballer, it means hundreds more paintballs in the loader, it means thousands more balls in your pots,"

Short-term thinking. You think we've seen declines in attendance at fields in the last few years? Just wait until fields start serving up 1 cent paintballs. You may as well add some tears in with your "more paintballs" because in the end, you'll have less people to play with. Idiots. Greedy short term thinking idiots.

Anonymous said...

And so the cram-down begins...

Mike said...

Ugh.
I don't like it. When this was first brough up I said paintball needs more unity, not division. Too many formats, and now new paintballs? Not helping.

I'll post more as it comes.

Missy Q said...

the interesting thing is that its Richmond. Is Richmond going to buy Procaps back for a fraction of what he was paid, or are procaps actually merging with Tippmann as I am hearing? If Tippmann get involved with 50cal then thats big, although I've not heard that's the case. Richmond and SP are championing this, although I'm not sure the grunts are supposed to know that until the patents are all in place...

Anonymous said...

Will any of the manufacturers' oppose this? How much of the Paintball Universe must accept this for it to be considered successful?

Missy Q said...

imagine the c02 vs air argument. Air was introduced years ago, and has been adopted by a lot of players, however most fields still use C02. They still operate, and operate fine.
the guns will come at the end of the year, and I don't expect there will be an issue getting the PSP to use them (considering PSP owners are involved). From there you may see a paint manufacturer like procaps giving field guns away for free for a while to try to encourage more users.
of copurse, they will hurt like fxck, and bounce like crazy, but maybe I'm wrong...

Pelc said...

See the thing about this that they're doing right is they're introducing this new company, Milsim, which you can tell by the name is gonna be for the new people who thing paintball is all about trying to be like the army and they'll be the ones who buy the next generation tournament guns. I'm not expecting everything to be the new .50 cal right away so it gives some time to adapt to the new gear and maybe even give a chance to sell some current gear. We'll see.

Anonymous said...

Well I think they are targeting the right demo for their .50 caliber paintball changeover. We all know Rec, Woods, and Scenario players have more disposable income than tourney players. So makes sense their first offerings are for Scenario and Woodsballers.

mick said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
mick said...

Cheaper paint equals more paint in the air equals more kids scared away from paintball. Make players slow down their rate of fire (like the most successful fields are doing today) and players will be at the field longer - not spending more money but rather creating congestion and allowing less customer traffic (turn over). 50 cal is only good for the proposed 50 cal industry. They will put their hands on the Bible and swear they are doing something great for paintball while in the end there will be paintball, airsoft and now 50 cal - further diluting and fracturing the game. How many times must the people who really understand this industry have to stand up and say "I told you so!" before anyone will pay attention.

papa chad said...

"who better than the people who bought us the Shocker" lol.

if this whole thing is "GIMILSIM," should we actually expect it to transition to the tournament scene completely/immediately/at all?
let the "95%" of paintball players who are supposedly not tournament players buy this stuff up, then when paint manufacturers are "happy" we can get our tiny population .68 on the cheap.

Baca Loco said...

If, at some point, the majority of the industry is producing 50 cal you will not get your 68 on the cheap, papa chad. You get it at the current prices by virtue of economy of scale and competition among producers. With little incentive and all the production capacity geared to a different ball size you won't get 68 at all. (But none of this is going to happen overnight.)

papa chad said...

yeah, it was a dream. so is my dream that current guns will be convertable. :(

Anonymous said...

I smell tournament guns from smart parts with the 50cal format on the horizon. It's most certainly not just milsim stuff. The real question will be playing a tournament with a 50cal gun vs. 68cal. It should be much easier to conceal hits if you are shot with a 50cal gun. I don't think a tournament player would want to risk that one lucky shot to the foot or ribs just completely disappearing because the mark is only the size of a dime.

papa chad said...

it will be a couple years at least imo. GIMILSIM will probably start off as a .50 SP gun and smaller loader system, like a clip or something, that they make a ton of cash from first, then they'll probably release a .50 Shocker after that. my guess.

Reiner Schafer said...

Here's my guess on how they will try to do get into the market. Smart parts will develope a relatively cheap marker setup for .50 calibre. It wil be available in two versions, a "regular - tourney" style marker, and a "mil-sim" marker, much like the Vibe and SP1. These will be peddled cheap to store and fields as rental markers (vibes are actually pretty decent rental markers). New paintballers going into stores will gobble these up, because they will be told that they are new technology and ammo to feed these smaller, lighter marrkers will cost half as much per ball as their larger, heavier, older technology counterparts.

Shortly after that, or maybe even simutaneously, G. I. Milsim will be introducing smaller, realistic Mil-sim type markers for the mil-sim crowd. Again, these will be gobbled up because they are smaller, lighter (maybe with clips) and ammo will be close to half the cost.

Then, once the paintball industry has embraced the new format, the tourney world will be overtaken. The whole process will take less than two years.

Seven or eight years from now, Richmond Italia will once again retire from paintball, this time much more wealthy, and the industry will have to try to deal with an industry where one cent paintballs are the norm...an industry new players will avoid because playing paintball in a one cent per paintball atmosphere will only be appealing to a very small part of our general population. Richmond won't be around to save us at that time though. We'll have to figure it out on our own. But alas, it will probably be too late because once you offer regular players one cent paintballs, they will demand them all the time. And there will be fools that will provide them.

End rant.