(Advisory: We'll be taking the New Year's break. There will be no news posts on the 31st of December 2019 and the 1st of January 2020. We'll resume posting on the 2nd of January.) Whilst it is not as phenomenal as the first decade of the 21st Century with its explosive growth, airsoft in the 2010s still experienced growth with new companies and brands coming in to bring more offerings and diversity. We worried about airsoft getting banned or its growth stifled with new proposed laws, but instead airsoft got strengthened with more activist individuals and organisations that banded together to prevent such and worked with legislators to ensure our hobby (and sport) continues.

We cannot predict the future accurately, but at least we try. Thus, for the next decade we hope that improvement in airsoft technologies --- making them more reliable, better simulation in operation, making them really playable out of the box, and requiring less upgrades (since they work properly out of the box) is something that many airsoft manufacturers, save for some exceptions, will work on.

We also expect that airsoft as a sport continues, be it several forms as there is no one airsoft competitive segment will dominate. We just hope that from Action Air, SpeedQB, and Battle Arena, come standardized airsoft competitions in terms of practical shooting, precision shooting, or force on force competitions. We would wish that with the rise of competitive airsoft it would grow into something lucrative like eSports, but it looks like it is still in the distant future, but we could always hope.

With all these wishes we have for airsoft in the next decade, we also have more wishes for airsoft players, wherever they are. We hope that they have will have a great decade in their personal and professional lives, that with the bad news we received left and right in the past decade as well as in the “lost decade” which describes the 2010s, there will be better news in the 2020s.

Hope is a powerful word. It makes us look into the future positively and that all will be well. Sometimes, that is all we have to cling to.

Happy New Year to all!

Top photo by Rakicevic Nenad from Pexels.

Graphics by NingZk V.