A post went up in the magfed community this week: In your opinion, what's stopping magfed from growing? And what would you do to help it grow? It pulled 116 comments in a few hours. Gatekeeping. Social media presence. Elitism. Valid threads, but most of the conversation stayed online.
Here's our take. Airsoft is eating what little soup there was for magfed. That's real, and we've written about it before: the scene is shrinking, not growing, and younger players are choosing cheaper, easier milsim options. But airsoft isn't the whole story. Three things are stopping magfed from growing, and all three are things players and organizers can actually do something about.
There are no games without players. That's the prerequisite for everything else in this piece.
In the United States, there are a very few selection of games regionally. The players who want magfed to become a reality must work hard to support the organizers and fields that do in fact offer this experience. It may require big travel, or cost. Nothing is free in life, including good experiences you enjoy.
Participating is not digital. You're not a player if all you do is post on Facebook. The community is in meat space and folks need to show up to the field. We've seen it firsthand: organizers run dedicated magfed days, half the people who begged for them ghost when it's time to buy a ticket. That's not a field problem. That's a participation problem.
Many fields do not care to support magfed. There aren't enough players to make them care. Field operations are a business for profit. Most all are not in it to enthuse a narrow niche.
They don't offer any free rental magfed platforms, so onboarding new players to the idea is impossible at nearly every field. Aside from Coyote, AFAIK, you're buying or borrowing gear before you can even try the format. Fields may not have the staff, patience, or interest in providing an experience you enjoy. If that is the case, don't support them. They will create excuses, limit gameplay options, or enforce unreasonable pricing measures on you. Go elsewhere.
Fields make more money selling paint to recball crowds. They want quick-turnover games, not ten guys in full kit playing hide-and-seek for twenty minutes on a five-acre field. Until enough players show up consistently, most fields won't invest in magfed rental fleets, dedicated rulesets, or the patience it takes to run limited-ammo gameplay well.
DYE. Tippmann. HK Army. They're also profit driven and go where the audience and money is. If a slice of the pie is small, then you will not invest in new product lines, marketing, or sponsorships.
This is a similar phenomenon that skateboarding underwent. Paintball has never made the jump, though airsoft is beginning to bridge the gap. Skateboarding captured massive vendor and corporate attention because it evolved from a localized subculture into a highly visual, globally mainstream youth phenomenon. High-profile media exposure, digital connectivity, and massive cultural influence made skaters powerful enough for investment.
Magfed hasn't crossed that gap. Innovation has slowed. Parts availability is drying up. Manufacturers seem unwilling to modernize proven platforms like the Dye DAM or the Tippmann TIPx; and you can see why. Sales have probably dropped so dramatically at the boardroom level that no one inside these companies can justify championing magfed product development anymore. Thank goodness for Planet Eclipse and First Strike still pushing, but the big brands follow the crowd.
Justin Lowe and I started a field operation, Coyote Airsoft & Paintball and Coyote Force (the "team") to support magfed gameplay and players. We organize monthly magfed meetups, support our partners First Strike and HR Tactical Innovations whenever we can, and encourage others to do the same.
We travel around the United States to games in Texas, Pennsylvania, New York, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan in support of those in the community making things happen. And we support our brother and sister magfed organizers like Strike Harder Pro and M3 Productions in the Midwest in their leadership of games and adventures.
This isn't new for us. We've been going the distance since before the pandemic; the golden era was built on travel, sacrifice, and showing up. That lesson hasn't changed.
Get out there. Don't sit back. Go to an existing meetup, even if it is a decent drive from you. Circle a date, plan it out, and make the commitment to turn it into an adventure. Meet organizers near you who have already kicked off meetups. If you don't have anything reasonable, work to get your own monthly meetups schedule and expect to work tirelessly to hound people to show up.
Everything else,. liking, sharing, commenting, boosting events is really nice. But it's not incredibly material and it certainly isn't additive to the scene in a long-standing way. Culture and presence matter. Gatekeeping doesn't help. But none of it replaces boots on dirt.
If you are reading this and you are in the Midwest, I hope to see you out there, Playa'.
Train. Compete. Belong. → coyoteforce.com/magfed
