I've thought about making this thread for a while, but decided to wait until the most appropriate day of them all: When Six Flags make their announcements.
As you may have noticed, Six Flags have built up a reputation in recent years for investing small and buying identical attractions in bulk. The newly announced Batman The Ride at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom will be the seventh identical S&S Free Spin the chain has built since 2015. Other introductions this year (and previous years) include Larson Loops, Zamperla Discoveries, conversions of existing coasters, and Tourbillion flat rides. Small, budget-friendly additions, off-the-shelf models that could easily fit into any of their parks. Why pay to design unique rides for every park, when you can do the engineering once and manufacture seven coasters off the same blueprints?
This is a pretty stark contrast to Six Flags' earlier approach during the so-called "Coaster wars" just after the turn of the millennium. Six Flags built huge coasters in all of their parks, usually breaking multiple world records every year. Huge rides such as Tatsu, Riddler's Revenge, El Toro, Superman: Ride of Steel and Kingda Ka popped up within a couple of years. When rides were cloned back then, it was mighty rides like the five-inversion Batman clones, the towering Giant Inverted Boomerangs, or the Medusa floorless coasters.
Of course, that practice wasn't sustainable, and Six Flags crashed pretty hard after the 2006 season. Since then, they've stuck to small additions, and the coasters they build tend to stay below 30 m (100 ft) in height. Just to give an example, the four coasters built in 2006 (Tatsu, El Toro, SFOG Goliath and La Ronde Goliath) are all taller than any coasters built across the entire chain since. At the flagship park, Six Flags Magic Mountain, only one of the eight tallest or fastest coasters has been built in the last decade. The biggest additions to Six Flags parks in recent years have involved re-designing existing coasters, the exception being SFGAm which got an RMC built from the ground up instead.
But the thing is... Six Flags is still making money. More than ever, actually. They're clawing their way out of the bankruptcy their previous strategy put them into. Their new rides are small and cloned, but attendance is up and revenues soaring. In fairness, sometimes, unique rides are being built in Six Flags parks, but they are usually noticeably smaller than existing coasters in the same parks (except SFGAm, apparently). It's almost as the question has to be asked: Why bother with huge coasters?
This obviously isn't unique to Six Flags. I constantly lament Parques Reunidos and their strategy to not build anything unless they have to, and then only the bare minimum. Same goes for Merlin, whose new coasters in recent years have been slight variations on stock models. But they too are making nice profits. And it seems like, as long as something new is presented at parks and marketed correctly, crowds will be drawn in. It doesn't seem to matter whether it is unique, or breaking a record, or otherwise massively big. A new addition is given a background story and some bells and whistles, suddenly a 25-meter tall GCI woodie is the most exciting thing ever to happen in the park, and guests flock to it like they would have if the coaster was 70 meters tall and cost five times as much money.
Do you agree? Does a 50-meter coaster have a significantly higher impact on a park's visitor numbers than a 30-meter coaster at half the cost? Is there a trend towards smaller coasters being built in the future, or are those aging giants still the majority of the reason to visit the park? I'm not talking about your opinion on these coasters, but whether you think it's a better financial move to build small and hype it up, rather than building big and impressing the crowds with stats alone. Because to me, it seems like the park get the same bang for less than half the bucks if only they do their marketing correctly.
As you may have noticed, Six Flags have built up a reputation in recent years for investing small and buying identical attractions in bulk. The newly announced Batman The Ride at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom will be the seventh identical S&S Free Spin the chain has built since 2015. Other introductions this year (and previous years) include Larson Loops, Zamperla Discoveries, conversions of existing coasters, and Tourbillion flat rides. Small, budget-friendly additions, off-the-shelf models that could easily fit into any of their parks. Why pay to design unique rides for every park, when you can do the engineering once and manufacture seven coasters off the same blueprints?
This is a pretty stark contrast to Six Flags' earlier approach during the so-called "Coaster wars" just after the turn of the millennium. Six Flags built huge coasters in all of their parks, usually breaking multiple world records every year. Huge rides such as Tatsu, Riddler's Revenge, El Toro, Superman: Ride of Steel and Kingda Ka popped up within a couple of years. When rides were cloned back then, it was mighty rides like the five-inversion Batman clones, the towering Giant Inverted Boomerangs, or the Medusa floorless coasters.
Of course, that practice wasn't sustainable, and Six Flags crashed pretty hard after the 2006 season. Since then, they've stuck to small additions, and the coasters they build tend to stay below 30 m (100 ft) in height. Just to give an example, the four coasters built in 2006 (Tatsu, El Toro, SFOG Goliath and La Ronde Goliath) are all taller than any coasters built across the entire chain since. At the flagship park, Six Flags Magic Mountain, only one of the eight tallest or fastest coasters has been built in the last decade. The biggest additions to Six Flags parks in recent years have involved re-designing existing coasters, the exception being SFGAm which got an RMC built from the ground up instead.
But the thing is... Six Flags is still making money. More than ever, actually. They're clawing their way out of the bankruptcy their previous strategy put them into. Their new rides are small and cloned, but attendance is up and revenues soaring. In fairness, sometimes, unique rides are being built in Six Flags parks, but they are usually noticeably smaller than existing coasters in the same parks (except SFGAm, apparently). It's almost as the question has to be asked: Why bother with huge coasters?
This obviously isn't unique to Six Flags. I constantly lament Parques Reunidos and their strategy to not build anything unless they have to, and then only the bare minimum. Same goes for Merlin, whose new coasters in recent years have been slight variations on stock models. But they too are making nice profits. And it seems like, as long as something new is presented at parks and marketed correctly, crowds will be drawn in. It doesn't seem to matter whether it is unique, or breaking a record, or otherwise massively big. A new addition is given a background story and some bells and whistles, suddenly a 25-meter tall GCI woodie is the most exciting thing ever to happen in the park, and guests flock to it like they would have if the coaster was 70 meters tall and cost five times as much money.
Do you agree? Does a 50-meter coaster have a significantly higher impact on a park's visitor numbers than a 30-meter coaster at half the cost? Is there a trend towards smaller coasters being built in the future, or are those aging giants still the majority of the reason to visit the park? I'm not talking about your opinion on these coasters, but whether you think it's a better financial move to build small and hype it up, rather than building big and impressing the crowds with stats alone. Because to me, it seems like the park get the same bang for less than half the bucks if only they do their marketing correctly.
