yeah i was totally oblivious to that, ive only been playing 2 years. I have no idea about disc history and time lines etc. When did innova start and how long have discraft been around, i jsut thought that as discraft have the official ultimate disc that they were also as old as DG?
infact why does discraft have the most uncomprehensible disc rating system?
0.5 tells you absolutly nothing. Does this affect discrafts popularity?
Discraft is actually an older company than Innova. The owner of Discraft was a big freestyle Frisbee guy who started Discraft to make a better Freestyle disc in the late 70's. Then they made the Ultra-Star for Ultimate. The rumor is they sell more Ultra-Stars than all of their golf discs combined. They got into the golf market early, but discs like the Sky-Streak were really just general sports discs marketed for golf. Their first beveled edge golf disc was the Phantom in '84. They had a small line-up of golf disc (the Eclipse is the only one of them still in production) from then until 1993, when they seemed to get serious about the disc golf market. They introduced the Magnet, Cyclone and Hawk that year, which was a major step forward for them.
Innova was founded in 1983 specifically to make a better disc for golf. Their first disc was called the Eagle (not the current Eagle) which was the first beveled edge disc for golf. They retooled the Eagle into the Aero, and then introduced a blunter disc you may have heard of...it's called the Aviar.
They created a series of discs based on the Aviar (the XD and the Classic Roc are examples of those discs) until 1987 when they started making the 21.7 cm diameter discs like the current Roc, Stingray, Cobra, Viper, etc.
So by 1987, Innova was waaayyy ahead of Discraft in terms of golf discs. The company that actually had a good line-up of discs to compete with Innova in the late 80's-early 90's was Lightning. Lightning had some of the most overstable discs on the market back then, and had a much more complete line-up than Discraft. Discraft really didn't become the # 2 disc golf company until the mid-90's.
Nobody really knows, since sales figures are not released for any of these companies, but the general consensus is that Innova holds 80% of the disc golf market and Discraft has maybe 10-12%. Those numbers right there kinda explain why there is more hype for the Roc than the Buzzz.
Innova has a lot of made-up stats like "speed" and "glide." All Speed tells you is how wide the rim of the disc is. The bigger the rim, the faster the disc. Glide is a function of turn. If the disc is understable, it will have a good glide. If it is overstable it will have very little glide. So really, I can take the rim depth and the stability numbers for a Discraft disc and pretty easily figure out all the Innova "ratings" for that disc. It's marketing, not science. But since they are getting their butts handed to them 80% to 10%, you could make the argument that Discraft marketing needs to step up their game.
