This whole thread is similar to many others from all around the world and they all seem to follow the same besice premise, that if something will be cheaper, more people will buy it and that will automatically make everything better...English and French will stop calling each other names, Israelis and Palestinians will unite, etc...
Well it's a very simplified look based on a misinterpretation of a very old economics' principle...and it's wrong.
Back when paintball was in its infancy stage, paintballs cost 200 dollars per box and people were saying the same thing - If we lowered the prices more people will play and the sport will explode like nothing else...Well, the prices went down and there was definitely no explosion, maybe a little puff of smoke...So they lowered the prices again, another little puff of smoke...and then again and again and again...Did the sport grow? Yes, but did anything major materialise out of this? Why yes it did - All the big companies (big in a national and international sense) pulled out of it, margins for some manufacturers fell so low that it became a struggle to stay in the business (NPS and PMI, Severe, Smart Parts, JT, WDP,...) and are currently at a point where the production technology does not allow for further price drops without killing the industry right there - That's for paintballs' manufacturers. Smart Parts did enjoy a great run between 2005 and 2008 as they became one of the biggest suppliers of low priced electropneumatic markers but once the market achieved a certain level of saturation - they got hung with the refusal of a bank to provide any further crediting (necessary for growth, product development and smoothing out the cash flow) - and we're talking about a company that in the last 3 years sold somewhere around 1 million paintball markers. Other budget marker manufacturers are more careful with everything that generates costs but their sales numbers range in tens of thousands of units at best.
In order for paintball to become what you'd want it to be, there would have to be hundreds of thousands of people playing it in every european country and millions in America - playing regularly, not renting out equipment once per year. But is that even possible?
Prices will not go down anymore, because manufacturers don't have any means of lowering them to. The current technology of manufacturing paintballs does not allow for that, and if you cut all the corners to make a cheap paintball you end up with something made in a country where the daily wage equals a bowl of rice with a bit of dodgy meat and it's certainly not a product that is good for the environment (anyone done a kool-aid test on their paintballs lately?). Equipment manufacturers have done their calculations and now that it costs them X HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS OR POUNDS OR EUROS to design a marker and in order to provide the right kind of support & marketing they need another couple hundred Gs and with all their costs they need to charge a certain amount of money because they will only sell 10 thousand markers yearly.
