And all you had to do to save the cash was undercut the actual inventor and stifle innovation. Bargain! Those clones are the reason that we never got factory-supported magazine adaptors and it took 5 years and counting for new models to come to market.
If they'll continue to prioritise the cheapest possible product at the expense of innovation and quality, airsofters really have no-one but themselves to blame when they get sold shitty, obsolete products that don't work properly out of the box or break shortly thereafter. It's not a coincidence that in 1995 a mobile phone looked like this and in 2020 looks like this, but a 2020 M4 AEG gearbox looks exactly the same as a 1995 one. It's not a coincidence that local airsoft retailers are going out of business (especially in the States) because people would rather save a paltry amount of money than support any actual customer service. It's not a coincidence that Magpul withdrew from their partnership with PTS in disgust and as a result we can't get PDR-Cs or FPGs any more. There is a direct link between people forcing manufacturers into a race to the bargain basement and manufacturers not having any incentive to make innovative products.
The "I would never pay £x for x, so they haven’t lost a sale by me purchasing a rip-off" argument sucked when it applied to pirating music, films and videogames and it sucks here. People buying it is the reason it’s produced. The entitlement of "I want it, but I don’t want to pay for it" is frustrating. It apparently cost TM $1m in 2008 dollars to develop the NGRS system; how are they supposed to recoup the first significant investment in AEG design since they invented the AEG if consumers set an arbitrary limit of "no more than twice the cost of a bargain basement clone of your old gun"?
It’s especially irritating with straight clones like the M12 because the clone literally doesn’t do even one single thing better than the original, except be cheap and poorly made. Even CYMA have improved over TM in important ways like having metal receivers. I fully support and will buy things that obviously borrow heavily from an existing design if it’s improved - I’ll happily buy an VFC, because even though it’s mostly a TM clone they’ve massively improved it by making it steel and wood rather than plastic and plastic.
This is all far from unique to the Sidewinder, it’s just especially annoying because it’s not the property of some huge faceless corporation. It’s literally one guy who designed an amazing product, put in a truly astonishing amount of his own money and time developing it, getting it manufactured, dealing it to distributors etc., and all so it could get ripped off and sold for profit by massive companies inside six months. At this stage it’s hard to tell if we deserve innovation.
Anyway, apologies for dragging the thread off topic.