Speedball - Problems.

Speedball is the generic name used to describe versions of competitive paintball played on relatively small, symmetrical fields using air bunkers.  The name didn’t exist when players were competing in the woods.  The name implies that at least one thing in the competition is taking place in a rapid manner.

Admittedly, my personal involvement with speedball has been fairly limited.  By the time I was more seriously involved in paintball, I was a family man in my late 30’s.  With family commitments and age not being on my side, there was no point in getting very excited about starting a competitive playing career.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t be a fan or put thought into something so closely linked to the industry I have chosen for myself.

In a way, speedball is a lot like the game of Dodge Ball with players trying to eliminate other players by hitting them with a ball.  The big difference obviously is that in paintball, the balls are difficult to see and travelling much faster, therefore there is not much dodging going on, so we need obstacles (bunkers) to hide behind to avoid being eliminated immediately.  The other big difference is that in Dodge Ball, there is usually only one ball involved, making the game relatively easy to follow.  Imagine what the game of Doge Ball would be like if there were 5 players on each team and there were 10 balls in play.  The action would be very difficult to follow.

Speedball is also a game where the strategy changes as the game is played, much like a game of chess.  Speedball teams may have set plays for breakouts and may have a few loose plays for when certain things happen, but in general, the players on the field need to be aware of what is going on and make decisions on the go.  Chess is like that as well, especially real chess where moves are limited by time.  Here the big difference is the number of players on each team.  Imagine what would happen if a chess “field” had 5 players on each team making moves simultaneously.  The game would be completely different and would be impossible for a spectator to follow.  As it is, chess isn’t a very exciting spectator activity unless you are deeply involved with the activity, much like paintball.

Whenever I read one of the threads on forums where people discuss how to “fix” competitive paintball, one of the first items that pops up in the discussion is that paintball is difficult to watch.  There are too many things happening at the same time for spectators to keep up.  While watching one part of the play, spectators will most often miss other important moves happening at the same time.  I have watched competitive paintball many times when the game is over, spectators are turning to one another and asking, “What happened?”.  With video replays, if enough camera angles exist, this can be somewhat alleviated, so that spectators (if watching a video version and not live) can catch up on what they missed.  But that’s still not nearly as good as a sport where spectators can see enough of the action live that they don’t need video replays to enjoy watching.

The other thing that comes up in these discussions every time is that paintball is “boring” to watch.  There are too many times where the risk of moving is much greater than the potential reward, therefore players will stay in their bunker and fight it out.  This most often happens when the number of players has been reduced, especially when there are only two players left, one on each team.

The third thing that comes up is the cost to participate.  Paintball, in most competitive versions, is expensive to take part in, and most often the cost of paintballs is the accused factor.  It’s obvious that all things being equal, a team with more ammunition has an advantage, therefore to be competitive; teams must arm themselves with large volumes of paintballs.  Teams that want to do well must also practice.  Practice, again, involves shooting paintballs.  Sure you can run some drills and maybe teams can even do some fitness stuff that doesn’t involve shooting at all, but when a game is basically about shooting paintballs to eliminate the other team, it’s difficult to practice without using paintballs.  Even “cheap” paintballs are a big expense if you need a lot of them, and to be competitive, more is better.

Next week I will discuss an off the wall solution that can help solve two of the three major problems associated with competitive paintball with the goal to make the game more exciting and more affordable without actually changing many rules of the current competitive paintball game.  The solution is so simple, you’ll wonder why you haven’t thought of it years ago.  Although a simple concept, the explanation is a bit lengthy, so be prepared to set a few minutes aside for it.

Free Market

In a free market system, businesses , as long as they are acting within the law, can do things pretty much as they see fit.  The free market system stimulates efficiency, good service, and low prices.  Competition keeps things in check and basically ensures that good value is provided by participating businesses.  Businesses that provide better value, see more customers.  But customers are not limitless, not in any industry and certainly not in paintball.

When a business provides better value (often achieve by lowering prices), that business will most likely see an increase in customers.  That increase can come from two sources.  It can be an increase in numbers of people who would normally not be customers of that type of business(or are normally not customers as often)  and it can be an increase from customers  taken from a competitor who is thought not to provide as great a value.

When a business makes changes to increase the value they are providing to their customers, and some of that gain in business comes from their competitors, those competitors then have a choice.  They can either not do anything and allow their customer numbers to decrease, or they can make changes to improve value in hopes of regaining those lost customers.  The point here is that businesses do not work in a vacuum.  If a business makes changes that affect another business (competitor), there is a very good chance that competitor will react, sometimes right away, sometimes later.

So when making changes, especially changes in pricing, always ask yourself, “How will my competitors react to this change?  Will they ignore it and let me do as I please, or will they feel forced to make changes to counteract what we have done?”  If your choice is to increase value for your customers by reducing  prices, and your competitor feels obligated to do likewise, you should anticipate this beforehand and make sure you can afford to do this.  Because in the end, if you and all of your competitors have lowered your prices, unless this stimulates enough increase in customers from outside the industry, you will all end up with less profit (or more loss).

When we first started our business many years ago, we were met with a price decrease by our competitors.  I guess they were trying to scare us out of the market before we got well established.  We met them with an equal price decrease.  Eventually, our competitors realized that all this was accomplishing was reducing everyone’s profit.  Years later, one of our competitors changed their pricing structure quite radically, but it meant that the overall price for their customers was lower than our overall price and the perceived value to their customers was even higher.  When they did this, this time around we ignored them for a number of years.  We knew that if we matched what they were doing, it would mean less money for all of us.  The difference in pricing structures partially confused customers, but in the end, the overall lower price the competitor was charging made a dent in our sales, which meant that we had to re-evaluate the situation.  Do we continue to ignore the changes our competitor made or do we react with changes of our own?  At this point we felt we had no option but to react, which we did by doing something similar.  We changed our pricing structure to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. 

We changed things around so that a customer that shot a fairly low number of paintballs, would pay less at our field, while those that shot higher volumes of paintballs would save money at the competitor’s field.  We would have preferred not to be forced to make these changes, because we know that in the end it will result in everyone making less profit (or higher losses), but we felt we had no choice.   This is how the free market system works.  When a business makes changes, competitors may react, and often feel they have no choice but to react.  So always ask yourself when making any changes to your business, “How will my competitors react to this change and can I afford to have them react in such a way?"

GOOGs (Gear Owner Only Games)

During this past summer, we started offering regularly scheduled games for gear owners only.  There were a few thoughts behind this idea.  First, let me say that many times we don’t get enough players at the field to have both gear owner and rental owner games, so splitting them up hurts our business on these days.  First, there is the fact that it’s not very much fun to play with smaller groups, especially on larger fields like our recreational fields are.  Second, having two games instead of one adds at least two extra staff we need to pay for, without adding any extra income.

I know many gear owners play more regularly than renters and the cost to play is more of a concern for them.  A $10 saving when you only play once a year isn’t a big deal but if you play 24 times a year, it adds up, and savings seem a little more important.  Our main competitor sells paintball for considerably less than we do and has attracted more of the gear owners over the years (I think we still get more overall, but the ratio has changed, so their piece of the gear owner pie has grown some).  So we started scheduling our Gear Owner Only Days (GOOGs) every Sunday.  We reduced our paintball prices by ½1/2 for those participating in the GOOG, actually making them cheaper than our competitors and obviously much cheaper for gear owners used to playing our regular prices.

This really stirred up some excitement when first announced and the first couple of weeks we had a higher than average turnout of gear owners who wanted to get in on the action.  One of the interesting things I noticed right away, which was a bit of a shock to me, was that many gear owners opted to play in the regular open group, with a higher ratio of renters, rather than in the GOOG, even though they had to pay considerably more for their paintballs (entry/air cost were the same).  After a while, the novelty of the GOOG wore off, and overall attendance at the field didn’t really change.  With many of the gear owners opting to play in the regular open games, there were days where we didn’t have enough players to have a GOOG.  We had no choice but to discontinue having scheduled GOOGs every Sunday and changed the schedule to having a GOOG only the last Sunday of the month, which is what the current schedule is.  We’ll have to see how many gear owners opt to play in the GOOG on the last Sunday in November.  October’s game saw about 20, which is just barely enough in my opinion.

The GOOGs obviously have a higher average level of skill and also better equipment on the field.  I thought that a lot of gear owners would see that as a positive, being able to play against better players on average, rather than renters.  I was wrong.  It seems there are many gear owners that are willing to pay extra to play in games that have lower average skill levels playing against them.  Our main competitor, who sell their paintballs considerably cheaper than our regular prices always has “mixed” games of renters and gear owners.  Our thought was that we would attract a few of those players as well, opting to play against higher skilled players, but that did not happen either.  When I discussed this with another field owner, he mentioned that most players would rather be wolves than sheep.  Given a choice, many players will opt to play in a game where they have a decided advantage.  Maybe I am naive, but since I personally would always prefer to play in a game where the playing field is fairly level, that thought didn’t really occur to me.  This is just another example of where a business owner (myself in this case) has failed by believing his viewpoint was similar to his customers’ viewpoint.  I personally would prefer not to play in an environment where a good percentage of the players were at a disadvantage to me (sheep).  Apparently, I am in the minority.

Paintball Burnout

I’ve seen many posts over the years regarding players that say paintball has lost its lustre for them.  I’ve also witnessed it many times at our field.  Players will play (recreationally) every week and even twice a week for months on end.  Then one day they stop coming and we never see them again.  While exciting at first, playing paintball gets boring for them.  I have seen it so often at our field that I actually worn players that I see playing regularly that they will probably burnout if they keep coming as often as they do.  The ones that I see coming for several years are the ones that only play once every month or two.

On occasion, some of these players will move over to competitive play.  This ups the ante as far as learning necessary skill goes, so the boredom aspect is not nearly as common, in my opinion.  Competitive players live for competitive play, and the amount of time actually spent playing on a field in competitive play tends to be less than recreational play.  Whereas boredom is the prevalent factor for paintball burnout in recreational paintball, financial burden is the most prevalent in competitive paintball.  Most former competitive paintballers I’ve met have told me it was the cost that eventually made them give up the sport.  Time commitment is usually mentioned as well, but most of us live for doing stuff that makes us happy.  We will find time to pursue those endeavors, but if those activities are also milking us financially, most often we give them up.

I grew up playing hockey as a kid.  My son grew up playing soccer and I spent a lot of time at the soccer field because of it.  Both sports have kids starting fairly young and although every year there tend to be a few drop outs, both sports still see adults playing many years later, especially in soccer.  The game never seems to lose its luster for those players.  My son is 29 now and still plays soccer and I can see him continuing for a few years yet.  I see players in competitive leagues playing into their 50’s.  But other than some travelling expenses to relatively close towns, the cost to play competitive soccer is probably only $400-500 per year.  It’s not a huge financial burden.  That’s not the case in paintball.

Competitive paintball is expensive to take part in.  Even recreational paintball isn’t cheap (btw, the players that tend to last the longest in recreational play are the ones that play with a pump and use far fewer paintballs), but it’s nothing like competitive paintball.  I wrote in one of my posts a little while ago that we are seeing much more movement and aggressive play from younger players in our Low Impact 50 caliber games.  They are getting involved in the play much quicker.  This is something that coaches of young kids in hockey and soccer try to get those participants doing as quick as possible.  They know if the kids get more involved, they will end up having more fun and it will speed up the kids’ learning of skills.  I also wrote that I thought this would make for more and better competitive players since the Low Impact paintball was getting more kids involved and getting those kids involved in the play quicker.  I still believe this can be true, but what about paintball burnout?  It doesn’t matter how much fun the game is for the kids and how skilled they are, if they end up getting paintball burnout due to the financial strain the game puts on the players, or in the kids’ situation, the financial strain on their parents, the kids won’t be playing when they are older.

In the end, it always comes back to money.  How many high level paintball players would actually be playing the game if they had to pay all their own costs including paintballs?  How many players actually make it to the high levels where some of the cost is paid by others?  You can answer that one by looking around and seeing for yourself.  There are some, but not nearly as many as there would like to be playing.  If we start having players play competitively even younger, will that just mean they will burnout at a younger age?  Will we end up with less, rather than more competitive players?  It’s a good question to ponder and it always comes back to cost.

Getting Old!

I think I'm getting too old for this.  I just can't get excited about half the stuff players get excited about these days.  A few years ago it was Ninjas and pirates...didn't excite me.  Now it's all about Zombies....still not excited.  Sometimes it feels like the world is being run by pre-teens.

Change is in the Air

The last few posts I’ve had on here have been about 50 caliber paintball, because that is where my focus has been at the field.  That part of our business is still relatively small but it’s humming along and growing and I still predict it will be a much larger part of our business within about a year.  But I’m going to step back from that for a moment and talk about the general operations at a paintball field, regardless of caliber size.

In the past, I’ve mentioned that for a recreational paintball field, to create an environment that is enjoyable for the majority of participants, the ROF (Rate of Fire) should not be measured in bps (balls per second) but rather in balls per day or outing.  The thought being that if players are somehow restricted to how many paintballs they can shoot during their outing, an environment that is pleasing (fun) to the majority can be created and thereby a successful business model can be built around that.

I still believe that to be true, but at this point, I feel I need to modify that a bit.  I, like everyone else has opinions and I usually believe my opinion to be the right one (otherwise why have it?), but I have always prided myself in being a person that will listen to others opinions and be able to change or modify my opinions if necessary.  In other words, I try to be open-minded and not too stubborn.  I still believe that an environment needs to be created at recreational fields (especially those catering to a lot of new players – which most fields need to do) that limits the number of paintballs being shot rather than just limiting the bps.  But the formula  for ROFshould be modified from balls shot per day or outing to balls shot per time spent as a live player on the field.  That measurement would most likely be best served in balls per live minute on the field (I’ll abbreviate that as bplm – balls per live minute).

I believe the model we have at our field is a pretty good one in that regard, as far as creating an environment where the majority of participants are going to have fun.  We are open for 7 hours on Saturdays and Sundays and the average player stays approximately 5-6 hours including our lunch break.   We usually play 12-14 fifteen minute games during that time span with breaks between each game.  It’s a fairly leisurely day for our customers, probably more leisurely than found at most paintball fields.  Most of the games are not resurrection games, meaning that when shot, the player leaves the field so in reality, players are probably only active (live) players for about 60 minutes of that time.  So if our customers shoot 500 paintballs during their stay, their balls per live minute would be 500 divided by 60 or 8.3 bplm.

Our main competitor used to run his business in much the same fashion.  That is where my partner and I played most of our paintball before we started our field, so it was only natural for us to use what we were used to in our own business model.  He has however in the last few years changed his business model, probably because he felt he couldn’t compete against us well enough with the same business model.  He has chosen to shorten the overall stay of his customers and have more resurrection games, which keeps the players “live” longer.  He also dropped the price of his paintballs to about 60% of what he was charging before and what we still charge.  I don’t know exactly, but I am going to guess that his customers are probably live players on the field for approximately 90 minutes during their stay.  His entrance fees are slightly higher than ours, but with his paintball prices being lower and knowing that the average player will spend approximately the same amount of dollars regardless of price of paintballs, it wouldn’t surprise me if his average customer shoots closer to 750 paintballs.  These are just best estimates, but probably not that far off.  Using those figures, his players are shooting 750 paintballs in 90 minutes of active or live play or 8.3 bplm.  Both our field and our competitor field’s numbers are estimates, so chances are it’s not exactly equal, but even if estimates are off a little, both business models are probably producing similar environments on the field.

He has lower markup on his paintballs, but with slightly higher entry and reduced cost in labour (less open hours) his profit/player is probably not all that much different.  My gut feeling tells me it’s probably a little less, but his change in business model has created an increase in business for him, so he probably has more profit than before the change when he had fewer customers (he’s also made other changes to his facility that would be viewed as positive from many of his customer’s standpoint).

His business model and our business model are very similar in the type of environment they create, therefore we draw from basically the same customer pool.  I’ve always said there are only so many people that will play paintball, that number only changing depending on what is offered (intensity wise).  The change in overall cost, unless drastic, is not going to significantly change the numbers of players willing/wanting to play.  His increase in business has therefore affected us.  Those players have to come from somewhere and the pie, although it has grown a little bit due to other positive changes for the customer, has not grown all that much, so that means we have lost some market share.

Being open minded, I have to admit that there are some perceived advantages his business model has from the customer’s point of view, mostly having to do with time.  Time in our modern society is very important to people.  People who come to our field may feel they are getting value because for a smaller fee, they can stay longer.  However, at our competitor’s field, although players are there for a shorter time period, they are actually active or live players on the field for a longer time.  Therefore they are playing more paintball, in a similar environment.  Needing to be at the field for a shorter time period while actually playing more paintball is a positive for many people.

Industries evolve.  Paintball has definitely evolved a lot over the years.  Businesses have changed and have needed to change to survive.  When a business sees a competitor doing something that works, it’s only natural for that business to think about adopting some of those changes.  I’ve seen this coming for a while but have resisted the move because I have a feeling it will result in less profit for everyone concerned.  Once we implement changes that mimic more closely what our competitor is doing, I have no doubt that we will regain the market share that we have lost.  Our competitor will of course lose some market share.  It’s inevitable and regrettable.  I wish he could keep all his customers and we could get new customers from elsewhere, but that’s unfortunately not the way it works.  The pie is only so big.

With this post I’ve obviously given our competitor some inside information, but there really isn’t all that much he can do with it and he would quickly catch on to any changes we make anyway.  We’ll try to differentiate ourselves obviously a little as I am sure he will.  But change is acomin’.  We feel there is no choice.