I have obtained the chest though I fear to open it. (I am not referring to the 360) What otherwise useless junk Haruhi-sama blessed relics lie within I do not know. All I know is that I must earn more money…
So I being the ardent follower of Haruhi-sama that I am, I gave what I could for the tithe and received a collector’s edition of SHnY. While I have no complaints about this purchase it did get me thinking to how much money I have really contributed over to anime over the years. Without going into numbers I actually spend less on anime products overall than Nintendo DS games, Wii games, Xbox 360 games, miniatures, and college tuition. Though on the whole I have more manga volumes than video games across all platforms combined, but the ratio of anime DVDs vs. videogames is widening.
While there is the issue of P2P piracy, I feel that the point is moot since the current economic model is essentially killing the industry albeit slowly. Besides good luck with regulating the internet and getting that big brother database that no sane democracy would ever accept. Perhaps it is merely nostalgia that anime seems better for me in ages long since past, but on the other had perhaps anime has lagged behind other forms of entertainment. Hell the campy series of Tom Clancy video games are far superior to any harem script and dare I say it over 90% of Gainax scripts.
When I pay for an anime DVD I pay on the average roughly 22-25 USD for 3 episodes at least and 5 at best at a brick and mortar store. Compare this to say the Chinatown bootleg, roughly 25 USD for 12 (an interesting note is that if I buy more eps the cost actually goes down too), which is surprisingly of comparable quality, passable Engrish subtitles, and without the extraneously painful and useless dubbing. Singaporeans pay for VCDs, Europeans (as in the rest of the world) get next to nothing, and the Japanese gleefully pay through the roof for 1-2 eps. So, are we subsidizing the stupidity of the anime industry? Are the Japanese to blame for enticing studios to adopt highway robbery by their support of DVDs with 1-2 eps each, or is their love of packaging just that great?
Are we all flying into mousetraps just for inferior goods?
In all honesty the cost of production is in all likelihood the same as both are probably most if not completely manufactured in a third world country anyway. The cost difference is principally in this license fee, and paying for the middleman, and cost of shipping etc. Then there is the issue of piracy being tied to organized crime and terrorism. (Though I think that as copyright violations go its preferable to say forced prostitution. Also the guy selling the bootleg is at times a middle school kid looking to make a buck, not very mafioso or Hamas like to me.) Here I feel screwed every time I pay full price to support the industry. I am paying for inferior products with dubbing that no sane person can enjoy. It makes little logical sense to go on supporting if money is tight and something better catches my eye like a bargain bin of old Gamecube and GBA games.
While supporting KyoAni in making SHnY II is all good, I feel much less so supporting this worthless tyrannical dubbing empire. The more anime I buy the more I am supporting an archaic business model that has to die soon as far as I am concerned.
In any other industry the manufacturer of an inferior good would in due course die, but not so with anime where the consumer is party to supporting a system that produces an egregious waste of DVD memory capacity. Thankfully I have not heard much hoopla about HD-Anime, which is rather stupid in my opinion as in animation of 2-D characters; art style will be the critical factor rather than 480i vs. 1080p. Its not like we are getting 4-D anime by simply switching media. A far better use would be to consolidate whole series into one disc, but that is just me. At any rate while digital distribution is logistically easier and far less costly the adoption of it is slow compared to another wonder kid of the 1970s-1980s, video games.
The success of i-Tunes, XBLA, Steam, and Wii Virtual Console should be a sign of things to come, and for anime downloading is the logical way to go given the ease of obtaining cheap memory, broadband, and laptops. The fact that another domain of dorkiness has done so much better is because they are being innovative and using technology where ever possible. If Nintendo, the champion of withered technology, is promoting digital distribution with Wii points; I wonder what is stopping anime from doing the same? I think this rather idiot insistence on getting every ill-gotten penny is the heart of the problem.
We know this…do we?
The anime industry is decidedly small compared to other industries, and as a result they are being left behind technologically. When the Singaporeans had that issue with ODEX I could not help but feel that ODEX deserved to go under. While the market there is indeed small, launching an intimidation campaign is about a dumb as invading Russia in the summer. Moreover if they sell these crap VCDs they fully deserve to go bankrupt for making a useless product.
There is a limit to how much I am willing to buy the “supporting the studio” line. While the shows were great, I doubt many of us throw money away for useless licensed paraphernalia in any great amount; at least until moysim spills the beans on how to perpetually avoid being broke. I think that as buying DVDs go, it is a losing proposition as within a few decades computers will be practically everywhere (as in actually in most households including what is today the Third World) and given the increasing use of the internet in many occupations, hard media is not the future.
While I have yet to join the darkside to any great degree like Impz, buying figures is one way to solve this issue of revenue stream that is not a total rip off. I hope one day, once Japan loses its xenophobia, I can watch anime on the first air date anywhere in the world. Heck the Daily Show has gone international and freaking Nickelodeon has a global empire. This begs the question of why Japanese networks are in comparison so pitifully small, but that is another topic altogether.
Kommondant Impz: Nyoro hijacks!!!! You forced me, Crusader, with the use of nyoro~ power!
Underling Crusader: Actually this would make a great DS game cover. A Tsuruya-san beat’em up because there is nothing more demeaning to thugs that getting being beat by a girl, let a lone a nekomimi green haired demi-goddess of DOOM. No H-games though. Nintendo is family friendly, if you want porn get a PSP or PS3 and PAY PLAY B3YOND.
Still the use of DVDs as a significant revenue stream is in all probability in its twilight. I will buy all the remaining SHnY DVDs for a full set, but not the nth special edition every year if that turns out to be their mad scheme. However I would much rather have another more useful licensed product say a Haruhi-sama blessed Tetris Attack (aka Planet Puzzle League) videogame with the accompanying ~nyoros to go with the garbage blocks. Having a series is nice but I am not so rabid that I watch it over and over again every day. For me DVDs just sort of sit there and take up space as stuffing them into a seabag is tough if I don’t want to break the disks. I would much prefer having everything in a more compact package, like a legitimate way of having it all on a 500 GB hard drive. That way it is easier to organize and takes up less space, and its easier to travel with.
As much as I like anime, if studios are hell bent on selling me hard media for decades to come then I am more than willing to let the art form die. If anime cannot adopt a better business model then it will become defunct. Its not the only source of entertainment out there, and hell manga will be there to fill the void. So this “support our work line” can only be taken so far.
Financial success is not just selling the least episodes for the greatest amount of money, its creating a fanboy/fangirl base that endures. Just look at Nintendo, Star Trek, and Star Wars. Okay, so the Star Trek games generally suck but Star Wars games generally get it right and are worth every penny , except Star Wars Galaxies.
So the question is whether or not the average otaku should buy licensed DVDs and support studios while feeding the licensing/dubbing empire from hell or be a pirate and buy other licensed goods? What licensed goods should be promoted as the new significant revenue stream? Would the average otaku abide by a cheaper digital distribution model that was DRMed, but industry standardized (like Valve’s Steam but bigger)? Would the average otaku be willing to watch a subbed episodes with commercials for free? How about a premium service like HBO with On Demand, getting to see the show you want to see right now with a click of a button?
23 Comments
What’s wrong with invading Russia in the summer? Is is better to invade Russia in the winter?
Maybe the land mass bridge would melt? But most historic opponents have had trouble maintaining their supply train through the rough Russian winters.
Dude. you should blame the consumers not the dubbing studios. the english speaking consumers WANT the anime to have a dubbed audio feature. so saying that YOU don’t want the dub doesn’t mean that the vest part of the audience doesn’t want it. if you don’t like the DVDs,don’t buy them. but don’t say that the whole anime industry should die because of that. and by reading your whole article, it seems like you don’t like anime that much. anime isn’t a mainstream product like games or music. you can’t compare them and you don’t need to compare them. is it really that pricey to spend like a 100 dollars a month to buy dvds you like? maybe for you, but it’s nothing compared to what you spend on a car for instance. while it’s not a cheap hobby, it’s not that pricey either. it’s all depends on how much you like anime.
Regarding the dubbing and subbing thing, I wonder if non-internet-goers are more inclined to prefer dubbing. Because the vast majority of anime fans online seems to prefer subbing.
Personally, I’ve yet to truly see a dubbing that is as good as the original Japanese. And while not all original Japanese are actually top notch, at least they sound more natural and less like Powerpuff Girls cartoons.
I would still buy hardware VCD and/or DVD, because watching animes on TV is more comfortable than watching animes on a small computer screen, and downloading animes take time and effort that not all people can afford. However, it is true that the price of animes is quite steep, not to mention the limited selection we have. I too agree that ODEX is digging its own grave. Maybe it will stop before it goes too deep down under. *shrug*
You generalize about the “anime industry,” but aren’t there significant differences between the “anime industries” in America and Singapore and elsewhere? US products are usually pretty solid compared to Odex VCDs, In any event, Anime fandom in America is not yet able to support things like an anime network, and the fans who download must still be a minority compared to all the people who buy anime on DVD, particularly shows like Naruto. And all the Naruto discs that are sold probably pale in comparison to the releases of the biggest Hollywood films. But the real dream would indeed have to be to have anime available without any middlemen at all, so there really would be only one anime industry, centered in Japan. But that is very far off.
In the US, if an anime sells 10,000 copies, it’s a hit. Cowboy Bebop is the best selling series, with one million discs sold. At 6 volumes, that’s about 167,000 sales per disc. Compare that to the people that watch Cartoon Network, where over a million people might watch a single episode of Naruto or Fullmetal Alchemist.
IF we could have dvds without dubs,it would be a dream.Can you imagine how much money they are wasting for something useless(and I will go as far as to say that it’s a betrayal of the original work).
Personally,I don’t understand why anime is sold on dvd and not on the net.Torrent clearly shows that it’s the way to go but no they still insist to sell us they 20/30 dollars dvds with three episodes and their useless dubs.
When they will sell us an ep with subs at 4 dollars,then I won’t hesitate.
But right now only a few shows deserves my money.One every year,probably even less.
@Zeustrae: Torrents are the “way to go” format because of one reason, they’re free right now. More people would rather legitimately acquire our anime on shiny discs. Anyways, at $4 an ep your pretty much at the same price point an ep would cost on DVD except.
Not really,it means 12 dollars/euro for 3 ep.It’s a lot cheaper.
@tj han and Kabitzin
Only one invader has ever successfully attacked Russia during the winter. The Russians have learned that in the event of an invasion there is no real need to fight for every inch of ground, you just need to fight for time. If someone invades in the summer by the time they reach Moscow it will be winter and the invaders better have a supply chain that works. Otherwise the Russians will just steamroller the frostbitten invaders in the following spring. Early Spring has to be the launch date of any invasion since time is a critical element because everything grinds to a halt in a Russian winter.
@arcane
If people wanted the dub that be then there would be no room for piracy in anime at all. The fact that there is a black market for this stuff that does not include dubbing means that there is a significant number of people who don’t care that much about it. If dubbing was such a good feature why would there be campaigns against p2p sharing? I believe that the feature of dubbing if it can even be called that is not of great importance because licensed DVDs are pretty much the only source of dubbed anime. If you look on e-bay the items that command higher prices are the ones that include Japanese with subtitles not the ones that simply have the dub.
Historically anime was once only a dubbed product it went even so far as not even admitting it was of Japanese origin. However as time progressed consumers gravitated towards Japanese audio with subtitles and more importantly uncut versions as dubbing also entailed cutting to make anime less Japanese.
To say that a car cost more makes little sense when comparing prices in DVDs. An F-22 costs much more than a DVD but that makes for poor comparison. On the other hand I can get a complete season of Star Trek TNG for about 50 USD for that much money I can get at least 6 eps or 10 at best, barely half a season. Here is where I take the most issue since native shows that are just as dorky command less overhead than anime.
I like anime a lot. I don’t like the business model associated with it and I see little reason to say that because I hate the business model that I am a lesser fan. The fact that Ghibli one of the most successful studios with recognition is often differentiated from the rest of anime tells me that there are a variety of things that prevent it from being mainstream. Being fringe is not a glorious thing as a rule, the fact that anime is associated with cartoon sex by the general population is a bad thing. Otakus cannot bash the mainstream for its ignorance of the fact because there is little effort made to bring them into the fold.
Video games make a good point of comparison because they were once fringe and only now have begun to gain mainstream acceptance. They were in the dork camp same as anime, but they showed the mainstream what a game could be and it then became more socially accepted. The fact that there are average joes in the military who play World of Warcraft but have not a clue what anime is tells me that we are failing to bring anime into social acceptance. In Japan video games and anime are linked as ero-game anime conversions are a dime a dozen and anime licensed games are as well.
Still congratulations on having the means to spend judiciously on anime DVDs, you comrade have made it in life.
@Briar
I am against dubbing mostly because the voice talent is not as great as in Japan. In the days of olde you had the same guys doing the same voice for different characters in the same series. Dubbing is also an instrument of dumbing things down needlessly causing cover ups. Why I recall that the yuri-ness of Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune was reduced to a cousin relationship… Suffice to say I have a distaste for lies in peace time, more over it was a blatant attempt to promote the ignorance of homosexual relationships.
HD tvs actually have more and more computer components put in them, hence why HD LCD TVs cost quite a bit more than the old CRTs. Given the computerization of tvs with more complex menus and ON DEMAND services its not much of a stretch to have anime broadcast to a person’s home for a set fee be it annual or monthly.
@DS
Well all companies outside of Japan have to buy licensing agreements and often adopt a similar distaste to file sharing and piracy. While American products are better there seems to be a universal rule on over charging. In the US Geneon which is Japanese owned has adopted a policy of licensing before the completion or even start of a series to have legal leverage over fansub groups. Others in contrast have tried to appeal to fans directly or simply issued requests to cease and desist upon the conclusion of such agreements.
In all honesty if this licensing fee is of greater cost than a licensing fee for Star Trek then there is something very wrong here as anime is still fringe. There should be no premium on the license as profitability is not as great.
@jpmeyer
Thanks for the numbers. However if the sales are not measuring up to viewer ship is this a measure of the failure of the creating of a nascent fandom or indicative of how low the bar has been set?
@ZeusIrae
Yeah I agree with the sentiment that the series that do make it to the US aren’t all worth my hard earned money. Sadly the series I would trow money at don’t always make it to the States.
@nooneofconsequence
Here I must disagree that anime needs to come on shiny discs. If you believe in the hubbub of having all of your media accessible where ever you go lugging around discs is not the future. If you make anime as a downloadable media then it becomes far more portable for people. Imagine if you will a sort of video iPod where people can take whatever media they want with them in a single pocket size package that intercaced with their 108″ HD LCD TV. Sounds much better than lugging around a portable DVD player and your shiny disks eh? Heck you could mix in a few of your favorite non-anime shows while your at it.
The success of iPod (and other MP3 players) and iTunes means that shiny discs are not nearly as highly desirable as convenience. Portability is where we are headed right now, the advancement of laptops compared to desktops is indicative of this and the decreasing size of media (SD cards thumb drives). While DVDs are indeed shiny, digital downloading is a far better use of resources as it does streamline the logistical aspects of getting anime to an audience. Not to mention is less of a waste in resources to manufacture. Besides DVDs are delicate and require maintenance. If I want hard media it better be hard and survivable, DVDs aren’t terribly solid in this aspect. Laptops at least come in tough book varieties.
Fancy packaging has little to do with the cost of DVDs in Japan. You get a very skewed view of what the packaging is actually like looking through blogs and forums as you only tend to see the things what look best. Even then, there’s rarely little which would actually cost significant amounts to actually produce. Really, it’s just an essential element of the market over there – it’s a very front heavy distribution model, and it has to be given the sheer number of releases (like, every episode of every show ever), as there is only so much shelf space available. Most DVDs only sell for a couple of weeks, so the extras are there as a limited time bonus to tempt people to pick things up quickly. Without the fancy extras, they’d still charge as much. That’s just the way the industry is over there – these are all late night shows, and they realise they are playing to a very limited market (particularly given everyone over there can watch stuff free – and legally – on TV). Reducing cost may sell them a few more DVDs, but it also slashes their profit margin. Chances are that people will only by the same DVDs they were going to get anyway, meaning they spend no more – or they buy to the upper limit of their spending ability, which means they get more DVDs, but there’s actually less profit in it for the distributors. Curiously enough, those titles that do sell outside the otaku market are actually released for reasonable prices.
Basically, Japanese prices are the way they are because they actually know the market, and they sell the DVDs at the price they know their audience will buy them at.
You say you can get a complete season of Star Trek:TNG for $50. You can get a complete anime season for $50 if you care to wait a year or two. Comparing Star Trek TNG to anime isn’t a fair comparison. Putting aside the fact that one has already made a fortune through worldwide syndication, DVD isn’t the fist time release mechanism for TNG. It’s an old show, it’s already been released on VHS years ago at rather less reasonable prices that you get it for now. Strangely enough, if you wait for a while, anime shows also get re-released at a cheaper price, it’s just that most anime fans are fickle to the point were they don’t care by the time they are re-released. The greatest show ever this year will be forgotten in the minds of a lot of fans this time next year.
Bringing things back around, as long as the Japanese can get away with milking the fans as much as they do, you’ll not find any reduction in the cost of episodes outside Japan within a year of it airing in Japan. They simply aren’t going to let a significantly cheaper release out on the market when they are still trying to sell the title to Japanese fans. It’s only going to get worse with the HD formats, where with Blu-Ray at least Japan and the US are the same region. A year later, when fans have moved on to the next, new exciting show? Fine, the sales will have dropped off by then anyway, but the Japanese aren’t going to risk their primary revenue stream to help out a secondary one.
As for online distrobution, there are attempts at it. Some labels went straight to Apple the moment they announced iTune Video, only to be told to wait inline with a group of other parties Apple didn’t really consider important enough to get to any time soon. ADV have their own online store. This week saw the first anime titles available on XBLA (mostly Funimation and a couple of ADV releases, IIRC). They are actually trying to push titles out by digital methods, but even in those cases the Japanese still dictate the minimum prices they can go with. It’s a big stumbling block towards getting titles on some of the mainstream online distribution services, thanks to them having entrenched price structures which conflict with what they are actually allowed to charge for things.
The realities of digital distribution, however, is that it doesn’t differentiate itself from what you can get illegally. If you can an illegal version for free much more quickly than a legal version can be released – or even within a short time period afterwards – then people are still going to do that. The army of illegal downloaders isn’t really a huge, untapped market – they’re a bunch of people who are getting stuff for free simply because they can. Honestly, I think it’s safe to bet most of these people are students and other people who really don’t have all that much money to waste on stuff like this anyway. They aren’t going to buy anything at a cost when they can get more than they can watch for free. You can throw more retail routes out there, but very few of them are going to bite. Most don’t understand or particularly care about “supporting the industry”.
Honestly, I don’t see any downloadable video market as being significant enough to ever replace the psychical media market unless they can kill off piracy. Music works because you are paying a small cost for a small item. With games, you are generally either buying similarly small games or re-releases, or there are other ways to hobble the release in an attempt to kill piracy. Anime is video, it costs more to make than music, has larger bandwidth requirements than music, and there are always ways to circumvent protection on video and make a duplicate of it. The online purchasing method for music and games really doesn’t transfer across to anime. As it goes, at least when purchasing a DVD it has a sense of psychical ownership to differentiate itself from the online piracy routes.
Oh, and I just don’t like digital distribution anyway, I simply like the sense of physical ownership. You don’t have to worry about odd things which can happen with DRM’ed digital media.
On the subject of dubs, you don’t like them, but if they could maintain the sales levels without producing them, believe me the R1 labels would. They cost a fortune to produce, but realistically they’d only be able to get disk costs down by $10 at most. The fact is that, despite what you hear in online fandom, dubs are popular. Dubs do sell DVDs. Seriously. The people who like dubs just don’t tend to float around the same parts of online fandom as we do.
“dubs are popular.”
But why?
For example,I imagine that there’s a dub for the Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi(I don’t live in the US).But except otakus,who’s going to buy it?Not a lot of people,so why bother with a dub?
You’re making the incorrect assumption that only otaku buy anime releases, which simply isn’t true. There are plenty of casual fans and occasional buyers – I’ve met a few IRL as well as on non-anime related forums – and, honestly, a lot of them are a too lazy to read subtitles. They’ve maybe caught a few shows on CN or something and have a passing interest in anime, but they don’t want to read what they are watching, and consider it to be distracting anyway (and, to a certain degree, I think they have a point). The thing is, there are a lot more of them then there are otaku.
But even then, among otaku there are dub fans. Seriously, Anime on DVD has a pretty active dub subforum, and there are a few dub-only forums out there as well. Even among those who aren’t so heavily pro-dub themselves, they’ll not buy anything which doesn’t have a dub – they consider it an incomplete release, something their friends couldn’t watch, something they’ll get less use out of because they’ll not have a dub to listen to and moan about. Really, go check out the any of the pro-DVD forums when there’s a subtitle-only release announced – there’s just as much bitching going on as when there is a dub-only release.
Ultimately, at one point or another, most of the US labels have tried releasing stuff reduced-cost subtitle-only. I’d imagine most of them have a pretty good idea of it’s effects on sales, which is why you only ever see it on uber-niche titles (like the second half of Gals!, which wasn’t even released in Japan). Heck, most of the time when they release titles via digital media routes, they’ll ONLY release the dub version. Why? As much as it might seem odd to us, it IS the version that most people in English-speaking countries actually want. Our view of the whole situation is seriously skewed by us being fanboys.
@DigiKerot
There doesn’t need to be any time lag at all for a reasonably priced season. Heroes which debuted in the fall of 2006 has its first season (23 eps) on DVD for less than 45 USD. Now it may be critically acclaimed but the license has not proven itself to be a major cash cow.
I find that in Japanese media there is a general fear and loathing of online distribution, Square plans on releasing hard media forever and given the anemic online offering it seems to me that there is no will to do it. More over if the current top heavy model of Japan continues the gaijin will have to milked just as much despite how idiotic it seems compared to business practices out side of Japan. This I feel forces anime to be less mainstream than it could be other wise as the cost is comparatively greater than native media.
Microsoft is looking to crush PSN and having more on XBLA can only help them. I find this attachment to hard media a rather strange thing since on that DVD is essentially information that more often or not has some anti-piracy software to prevent copying. It is in a sense DRMed already. DVDs break and if they do there is no one to cry to get it replaced, at least with Steam you can get back your game if the file gets damaged. Besides if having your series on a hard drive less physical than a DVD disc? You don’t have to worry about scratches.
As for illegal downloading if the price is right it may no be a rampant, and at least you make some money off of it rather than none at all. I think that iTunes and ON DEMAND proved that at a certain price point enough people will bite to make it profitable. Since there has been little effort to make this a reality we really can’t know. What I do know is that given the rather low volume of sales compared to other forms of entertainment the current model is not helping and possibly exacerbating the issue of low sales. Given the collapsing of Japan as a major territory viable for profits compared to North America and Europe the emphasis on Japan is in all honesty a losing proposition in the long run. Japan is still suffering from a freeter issue and a declining brith rate, less people and more importantly less gainfully employed people mean that there is less and less disposable income to be had.
Dub is a rather strange thing if it were good enough to carry a series to success why is not offered exclusively nowadays as much as it once was? If the consumer did not want to read why then bother with subtitles? I find it curious that people as so adverse to reading subtitles when it is not that hard, especially given the fact that the number of dub voice actors is rather small and production does get weaker in this regard. Stranger still when you watch the news its not like they simply dub over a foreign press release I see quite a lot of subs for those nowadays.
For me English dubbing removes a lot of authenticity to anime and more often or not the plot can be fucked with too. Since you know a few dub lovers are there any of them that insist that Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus were just cousins? The strange thing is the pain I went through on ebay to secure seasons one and two of Sailor Moon the sub only DVDs commanded higher prices than the sub.
“Heroes which debuted in the fall of 2006 has its first season (23 eps) on DVD for less than 45 USD.”
Oh, I hadn’t realised there was a release date for Heroes now. Last I looked there wasn’t one.
“DVDs break and if they do there is no one to cry to get it replaced, at least with Steam you can get back your game if the file gets damaged.”
Hard disks can break as well. With anime, studios will generally have a fixed licensing period. What happens if you lose you digital file after the provider has lost their license? You’ll probably be just as stuffed as if your DVD broke.
“What I do know is that given the rather low volume of sales compared to other forms of entertainment the current model is not helping and possibly exacerbating the issue of low sales.”
The comparatively low sales just tells me that it’s a niche market. Seriously, even in Japan most anime is made to air late night in timeslots that no normal person would want to watch shows in. They are making these shows purposely for a very, very small market.
You keep making reference to videogames as something which began as a nerd past time but became more acceptable. It’s not really a valid comparison – videogames made massive movements to become mainstream through the kind of content provided. Things became increasingly photo-realistic, and the vast majority of those games with actually sell well are mainstream-friendly subject like sports games, racing titles and movie spin-offs. These things are a gateway through which other people get into other games.
With anime, however, the closest we have to mainstream titles are, well, the Shonen Jump titles like Dragon Ball and Naruto, which air in proper timeslots both in Japan and out. The thing is, these are all shows predominantly watched by kids, as with adults you have another issue – the aesthetic. It’s the one thing about anime that is limited by how far you can take things, yet it’s also the thing that puts off the most people. Lets face it, if it’s not a home grown prime-time comedy show, then most people consider animation as being for kids. You aren’t going to change this no matter how hard you try. Essentially, you market for anime consists entirely of young people (who don’t have much money), and a small core otaku market.
At the moment, the market is largely kept going by people who watched Dragonball Z on Cartoon Network when they were younger. Given nothing they’ve thrown out since then has managed to gain the same popularity, it’ll be interesting to see what’ll happen when these people start turning their back on the medium.
Back to the Heroes/US show DVD release thing, I guess it’s a difference between primary and secondary revenue streams. In the US at least, the ONLY revenue stream for anime tends to be the DVD release. Whilst ADV and Funi may be trying to change this with their individual TV network thingies, there are a very limited number of shows that the more mainstream broadcast outlets for anime titles will even look at (largely Jump titles, outside of that they’ll ignore anything with a female lead character or without a sizeable male cast). Broadcast options are limited.
With US shows, the primary revenue stream is selling your productions to TV networks for large sums (not just in the US), and product placement within a show. The direct video market is a secondary revenue stream – they’ll have already turned a profit on production when they hit this point – which gives them a bit more flexibility in how they price things. That, and the fact that most of these shows air on major networks at sensible times means that people actually know they exist. It’s hard to build up a fandom for anything when the only methods for people to find out about these things either revolve illegal file downloading or spending money, both activities being things where you’d have to be actively searching for things.
“the number of dub voice actors is rather small”
It’s not really that small, and honestly, it’s pretty much the same in Japan. Most the main roles in anime shows are taken by the same voice actors over and over again even over there.
“Since you know a few dub lovers are there any of them that insist that Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus were just cousins?”
No, I but then I don’t really know many who watched Sailor Moon.
The thing is, your view on the matter is being heavily skewed here by what you have seen on TV – you are using a really extreme example there. The dub of Sailor Moon was specifically produced to market towards young children, and was hatchet-jobbed to fit within what they considered was acceptable towards that kind of market. Sailor Moon wasn’t dubbed, it was versioned, and there is the world of difference.
Also, just because people like dubs doesn’t mean they are completely stupid. Most of them would be aware that something like Sailor Moon was not only teaming with heavily re-written dialogue, but also had great chunks of footage removed or moved around and other things of the ilk. Same with the likes of Card Captor Sakura, or the broadcast version of Escaflowne.
Take your average DVD release, however, and you’ll find the dub shares the same video stream as the subtitled version, so no changes there. It’s very, very rare that the dub on any of the made for DVD releases is particularly unfaithful – there may be minor tweaks here and there simply to make it sound less awkward when spoken, but the majority are faithful. Honestly, there’s some really anal types that’ll watch the dub with the subtitles running just to check. Maybe you should do the same with that Haruhi DVD you’ve just gotten and see what I mean? Heck, in the dub clip I saw they even used the term “moe”…
one fact that is often ignored is anime is still not mainstream. given a choice between an american and a japanese anime film, i dare say 99% would prefer the former over the latter. anime is still unappealing to the masses, and making it as such will only destroy the one major aspect of anime that we like, which is its difference; its uniqueness; as compared to mainstream stuff. Heck, virtually all my friends have NOT heard of cowboy bebop (in response to how ‘renowned’ the title is according to the afore-mentioned claims) and one idiot had the galls to call the cowboy bebop movie ‘uninteresting with a weird sounding title’ WITHOUT even watching a single minute of it. few are giving it a chance, or even taking a short glimpse of it, so can you blame the Japanese for not putting more effort to promote the stuff? for now, it’s not worth the effort and time. After all, people are generally more accustomed to american stuff than japanese. The proliferation of video-streaming sites has only served to increase anime’s profile but this has yet to translate into commercial success for the anime producers in most parts.
You haven’t seen the box for volume 2 yet have you? It will make you wonder…
@DiGiKerot
Heroes season one is due in August of 2007. I admit that I have a very low opinion of dubs, I remember the dark days of Sailor Moon, Escaflowne, and Cardcaptor Sakura and their horrid affair in the US. I am slow to forget such transgressions even slower to forgive. While dub lovers are not universally stupid I find their tastes to be rather strange.
While anime is in a niche market right now there is nothing wrong with it trying to become mainstream. The games that are the most popular are proving to be casual games without photo-realistic graphics. That is where the most profit is to be had, since the cost of making your next gen blockbuster is very high. Let’s not forget that the higher cost of next-gen games has created a used game market where the creators of the game make zero dollars off of the sale. Last I recalled Nintendo is proving that HD gaming is not that compelling right now. In fact Pokemon is, both diamond and pearl, dominating the charts along with Mario Party 8, and Wii Play. Guitar Hero II is not photo realistic, only next gen reps Spiderman 3 and Forza 2 are actually in the top 10.
I really do think that videogames are a good point of comparison because videogames were once niche and through more compelling content it got to where it was today promoting a vibrant gaming culture where the picture of the average gamer has become vague indeed. Anime is niche, the international renown of Ghibli means that anime can be mainstream if the content were compelling enough. The boon of becoming mainstream was that videogames became cheaper. Gamers were offered more choices and genres. The negativity was much reduced. If video games are a bad comparison how about miniature gaming where it has become so niche that it is a virtualy monopoly or oligopoly at best? Prices in miniature gaming rise, in some cases, much faster than the rate of inflation. Yet the final product is slow to evolve, but the price is going up not down.
While anime is considered kiddie now I have to admit much of it is well deserved because the mature series are by far in the minority. Gundam has gone all to hell but how about another Macross? Lets not forget that in the West there is still a dim memory of Robotech and that Transformers was once a shared IP.
As business models go why has anime relied so heavily on DVD sales rather than simply allow advertising? How many WacDonalds have we seen in anime? Quite a few I reckon. We have famous locales so why not just allow for the occasional cola ad? In fact it may even add a bit to the illusion of familiarity.
@Xstacy02
I think we can nail the Japanese for failing to adopt better business models. If I can more easily watch Korean, Indian, and Chinese as opposed to much Japanese stuff on TV, something is afoot. For anime to not have been able to achieve this in an age of globaliztion means that something is failing. I don’t think that being unique means having to be outside of the mainstream. When the Korean Wave hit it did not mean that those shows sucked they were good and people saw that across the spectrum. I can and do slam anime for having an excessive number of harem series, having such overtly male oriented overly sexual content is not going to make the West grovel before anime in awe. Yet that is what gets promoted, that is the genre occupying a lot of shelf space.
The thing is, video games are far too board a thing to be a good comparison to anime. Think about it – what alternatives to videogames are there that do a similar thing? Sports? Board games? Those are both significantly different. The increasing popularity has as much to do with it plugging a hole nothing else does.
Anime, however, comes much further down the tree than videogames do. The comparative level to videogames would be, say, “linear video entertainment” or something to that effect.
The point is that, once you get down to the level at which anime resides, things are far, far less broad – there are alternatives that do near-enough the same thing. To keep the videogame comparison worthwhile you’d really need to look at taking an individual genre – say, RPGs (though a subset of thegenres would probably be closer to the level of anime). RPGs are still, largely, a nerdy, niche genre. Most of them only sell to a smallish number of devoted fans who buy pretty much every release they can afford. Sure, there are a few big sellers which manage to sell in large numbers, like Final Fantasy, but that’s essentially your Ghibli or GitS in anime terms.
Ultimately, though, the point is that there are already more mainstream alternatives to anime. Given the chance to watch, say, Heroes or Darker than Black, which do you think most people would watch?
The fact is that anime won’t become more popular to any really significant degree – at least not quickly – whilst there are more popular alternatives fulfilling the same kind of need. The only way to make anime more popular is by getting more people to watch it. You could make DVDs as cheap as you want, but you can’t force people to buy them. They won’t buy them of their own free will unless they know that there’s a chance they’ll enjoy it more than some of the alternatives. They’ll not know that is the case unless they actually watch some of the stuff.
They’ll not, of course, be able to watch stuff because they’d have to pay for it. They’ll not see anything on broadcast TV because, well, they aren’t going to show anime shows when there’s something they know will get far, far bigger viewing figures. You are basically stuck there. The alternatives would all require them to go out of their way, so they may as well stick to what they can get easily and stick with good, old US TV.
Ultimately, the only real way to significantly boost fandom is to hook them whilst they are young – whilst watching cartoons is normal – and hope they stick with it. That’s what happened with Dragonball Z, and that is why fandom is as big as it is now. If anime is ever going to gain a more significant fanbase, we basically need a new Dragonball every four or five years to sustain the growth. At the moment, that simply isn’t happening.
The other thing which makes video games a bad comparison is that it’s pretty much wholly a pay-for medium – whether its coin-ops or PC or console games, there’s generally a per-game outlay. With anime, it’s competing with TV, where if you have any ongoing costs it tends to be a flat subscription payment.
I’m not sure about the comparison to miniature gaming – I’ve not really followed the scene for a good few years now.
As for the advertising thing, well, we are starting to see that with Code Geass Pizza Hut deal, and the cars in Solid State Society. The thing is that, well, the audience for these shows in Japan is still way too small for it to be really worth their attention. Maybe for a Naruto or a Gundam or something else with big viewing figures it’d be worthwhile, but in a lot of cases it’d be contrary to the setting. For real-world stuff, maybe, but most of those are late night shows, and these things could potentially cause far more headaches than they’d solve. I mean, Pizza Hut may be happy to sponsor Geass in Japan, but that doesn’t mean that divisions of Pizza Hut in other countries would be willing to go along with things. It’s quite possible for, say, Pizza Hut Europe to take exception to it and block foreign sales. It happens with music in some shows, so it’s bound to happen with licensing deals. Are studios really going to want to have to animate chunks of a show twice just to be able to sell things abroad?
Of course, western shows get away with it, but that comes back to the popularity thing really – anime simply isn’t popular enough at the moment to hold any real sway.
Then there’s the fact that most anime shows aren’t really the kind of thing most companies would want to be associated with. You’d really need to have a huge shift in the kind of and content of the shows we are getting before they’d be more willing to invest. That’s probably good for me – the swing would likely be in the direction of the kind of show I like – but that probably wouldn’t go down very well with a lot of fandom ^^;
Well in the West since broadcast anime has yet to catch on with a few exceptions to a few small networks anime is pretty much pay as you go kind of deal. Anime itself has a number of genres so it is no less broad than vidoegames even if the total numbers are still small in comparison. If you want to look at RPGs Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion did fairly well and World Of Warcraft has more subscribers than Austria has people. Within the RPG genre its not always about grinding and fetch quests. In that vein Legend of Zelda is an RPG as well and it has sold far better than any anime series yet it is very niche.
While the content of anime needs to change in order to garner social acceptance outside of Japan. Price as its stands is a barrier to entry and it doesn’t have to be that way. Pokemon is still chugging along and every few years another batch of kids suck it all up along with idiots like me who use to play Red and Blue in the school yard. Saying that we need to hook kids while they are young sounds a bit devious and evil.
Anime has to be more accessible and lowering the cost of entry is way of doing that. Still the need for a shift in the series that are being produced has to occur it doesn’t mean that it all the otaku old guard will hate it. Hell how many instant classics series have taken over the blogosphere lately? Anime is also guilty of carrying a lot of garbage as well.
Just because anime covers a number of genres doesn’t mean it’s particularly broad, though, as anime only really covers a small portion of each genre when you consider it within the context of all TV produced everywhere.
If you want to carry the RPG thing further, RPGs cover a number of genres – theres SRPGs like Disgaia, online games like WoW, action-types like Zelda (though, to be honest, I’m fairly loathe to clump Zelda in with RPGs) and turn based titles like the FF series. For every Zelda or Final Fantasy that’s released and sells hundreds of thousands, there’re a dozen Atelier Iris’s that sell a few thousand. In terms of the number of titles released, and the kind of fandom it has, RPGs really are the best genre comparison as long as we discount WoW as being, well, the incredible oddity it is.
But, really, the point is that videogames only really compete with other videogames. Anime competes with other linear video entertainment – as many genres as there are of anime, there are of live action shows or US animation. The fact is that videogames started off at a way more advantageous position from the beginning – coin-ops installed in public places like bars and clubs stimulates competition between players for one thing, which is always good for building interest. The fact that they were, for a long time, considered only as childrens toys was another advantage – it’s easier to market at kids, and those who grew up playing them are now getting into their 30s and 40s with no alternative to fill that gap in their entertainment. They are used to playing games. Basically, they’ve become mainstream because they are used to playing them. They buy them for themselves and their own kids now, and the cycle repeats itself. It’s only recently that they’ve started targeting even older markets, and you can bet most of the games bought for older people are bought by their middle aged children.
Cost is really only a very small factor in increasing anime popularity – the real effect of reducing cost is that you get a few of the people who already watch anime to buy a few more legitimate releases. The companies probably wouldn’t make any more money due to reduced profit margins, even if they do shift more copies.
I don’t disagree that anime has to be more accessible for it to become more popular, it’s just that when it has any discernible price attached to it, no matter how small, it’ll only appeal to the existing fanbase. People simply won’t invest in an unknown, something they know absolutely nothing or very little about. The real problem is exposure, and this is the reason the anime market is stuck in the rut it’s currently in. They’ve basically ran out of means to increase exposure to the medium. Fansubs or legal download samples only really help spread word of an individual title among existing fans, because with anything on the internet you actually have to go looking for it. It requires action on the part of the viewer, and if it’s something they don’t really know, they aren’t going to put that effort in.
Basically, at this point, if they want to increase exposure (therefore fanbase, and the reduction in prices that comes with it), they need a way of spreading the word which required zero effort and zero cost to the person they are trying to promote it towards – which these days essentially means broadcast TV on a channel people actually watch.
Which, largely, won’t happen whilst they have something with a larger guaranteed audience they can show. Ultimately, the US anime companies are stuck in a minimal growth situation, picking up a few kids from Naruto and DBZ re-runs and a few curious people coming in from vaguely related hobbies (normally people who play a lot of Japanese videogames – it’s certainly how I got into the hobby, many years ago).
Which is why I say we need another really, really big kids show to come along – kids TV stations are the only ones which’ll show anime. If you want something to go more mainstream, it has to be made available to the mainstream, and even if it is heavily butchered in the process, kids TV is pretty much the only mainstream outlet for anime now that Toonami seems to be cutting back. You just have to hope it catches on and makes enough people curious to go looking for more. That’s the point at which you need to start looking at lowering costs, but until such an event happens any cost reductions would simply be shooting themselves in the foot.
It seems I still have to disagree all forms of entertainment compete for the same pool of disposable income.
Still since WoW is the gold standard which all MMO RPGs are measured we can’t treat it as a a seperate entity because it was a project that was in years of development and the content and community that grew out of it showed just how mainstream a single game can be. In that same vein South Korea is still under a Starcraft occupation. In regards to videogames it was a melding of East and West that allowed for it to be a global media. Since anime is still Japanese that could be another point of why it remains foreign in the West. To say that anime never had a chance is false since there are old salty sea dogs who do remember Robotech and Akira to be the coolest shit in the world. There was a chance in the 1980s when you had Air Force guys trading tapes of Space Battleship Yamato, anime squandered its chance by catering to a niche market in Japan. The massive output of harem is proof of this.
You have PVCs of a racy nature depicting very sexualized female characters. Women have no use for them, and most boys at that time would have more sooner gone for a shiny new mecha rather than an over priced Barbie equivalent. I am sure that Gundam could have gone toe to toe with GI Joe, but it was not to be since there was no follow up.
I agree that the content has to change first before but preferably with a price drop. Compelling content does not guarantee good sales. Okami for example had a terrible sales record. While anime has been scaled back I have to admit it was well deserved since nothing with universal appeal has appeared in anime for a long time.
Lastly Zelda is an RPG and a damn good one. Its just that your run of the mill RPG is too focused on grinding and fetch quests to realize that cool drops and cool boss battles play a big part.
“Essentially, your market for anime consists entirely of young people (who don’t have much money), and a small core otaku market.”
no, it doesn’t. i’m not an otaku [i don't even read this blog, i just scan through occasionally for leading articles, and since i'm interested in distribution models, this entry caught my attention], nor are any of my friends. i earn a very comfortable salary. i’m a manager. i’m 33. i’m a girl. i watch quite a bit of anime & dorama, but, you know, i do other stuff too.
(on voice acting) “It’s not really that small, and honestly, it’s pretty much the same in Japan. Most the main roles in anime shows are taken by the same voice actors over and over again even over there.”
true, like the industry in the west certain actors tend to identify with certain genres and/or studios and/or directors. but (a) seiyu are good and (b) sometimes you get oguri shun.
i run like hell from dubs for ANYTHING. the original language is always better.
“… really do think that videogames are a good point of comparison because videogames were once niche and through more compelling content it got to where it was today promoting a vibrant gaming culture where the picture of the average gamer has become vague indeed.”
and let us not forget the advertising budgets.
“Ultimately, the only real way to significantly boost fandom is to hook them whilst they are young – whilst watching cartoons is normal – and hope they stick with it.”
nope. i didn’t grow up watching anything – no tv – and everyone i know who likes anime has come to it in adulthood. we’re moving from a hits culture to a niche culture – recs are the way this stuff will spread. and the ability to sample easily. (plus i don’t live in the US, so licensing issues bite more.)
“We have famous locales so why not just allow for the occasional cola ad? In fact it may even add a bit to the illusion of familiarity.”
totally. it works for live-action so it should work for anime. kekkaishi and nodame (i think) are both sponsored (although i’m a little annoyed at kekkaishi’s tendency to remind the viewer of its sponsors half-way through).