Forum - View topicINTEREST: Gundam Director Shinji Takamatsu Responds to NHK's Anime Industry Special
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aifhak
Posts: 57 |
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but the thing is, that that's a really tricky thing and it just isn't as simple as "source material is all that matters (for a season 2 etc)". Of course it's important but it's far from the only thing that's relevant. In fact there are a couple series that are probably selling too well and that's why they're not going to get a season2 any time soon. I'm not expecting another season from NGNL or Mahouka any time soon simply because they're both easily among the best selling LNs out there right now and have been for the past years. Spending 1-2 million on an anime to boost sales makes no sense because the series are already selling like crazy so instead we're getting years of nothing followed up by a movie (for both actually), which probably has a quite different model of revenue compared to your normal series. Like KonoSuba, sure they got their s2 immediately but the strong BD sales sure as hell were a major point in that. Yes the LNs sold like crazy as well but now we're sitting here with an announcement that the "collaboration" is basicly over and there's no s3 planned despite LNs still selling like crazy, despite BDs&DVDs still selling like crazy. I just don't think the "all that matters are source sales" is any more true than the "all that matters are disc sales" statement, which is to say it's oversimplifying things way too much. Yes they're important but it's not everything And of course anime is an investment for publishers. But the same is true for everyone else as well. Noone is going into this with the expectation to lose money because they're so passionate about it. Sure the people working on it may be passionate and that's what drives them but the people chipping in money aren't doing it for charity. So yeah, it's an expensive ad but that doesn't mean it's only the source materials publisher who uses it that way. It's the exact same thing for everyone else involved. |
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Jonny Mendes
 Posts: 997 Location: Europe |
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Of course is not what the only thing that matters. SAO and D X D are going to have more seasons and LN sales are on the highest point that will get. There is the point were LN sales are not relevant anymore. That is when the anime get a live of their on and become become less dependent of Publishers wishes. but that are some exceptions. The same will happen with are going to happen with Re:Zero. The sales of LN are not going to be bigger that they are now. But It become so successful that will have more seasons. As you refer, many anime like NGNL or Mahouka are not going to have more seasons even if they have good DVDs sales. The LN peaked and the publishers are not interested in investing on more anime. And even with good DVD sales, they didn't become big enough to be more independent from publishers. KonoSuba was expect of having a second season because it was what is called a split cour. That was planed since the beginning. The same happened with The Testament of Sister New Devil, and Gakusen Toshi Asterisk. As a conclusion, what my point is: LN/manga sales is the most important part when we are talking of anime that depends on Publishers to be made and are made to promote manga and LN's The other part of the Production Committee are important to help in the investment, but not essential in the decision of more seasons. When the franchise becomes big enough and successful enough to become less dependent on the publishers investment (SAO, D X D, Re:Zero) then the other parts (DVD sales, music sales figurines sales), are more important than LN sales to make more seasons. As is be said before, is not that LN/manga sales are the most important or DVD is the most important. It all depends on what the objective of the anime is . If is made to promote and improve LN/manga sales or is made to sale DVDs, figurines, etc. |
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aifhak
Posts: 57 |
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you do realize that Mahouka is selling better than Highschool DxD and ReZero in LN as well as DVD/BDs even without anime on air, right?
so if your argument that Highschool DxD is getting more seasons because it can finance itself with BD sales + figures + whatever other goods instead of having to rely on the money from the publisher was really the case the same would be true for Mahouka, NGNL etc which is easily selling more even while no anime has been out in years to promote it. (Though like I said, they're both getting a movie but people want more seasons of it and we all know it's not going to happen exactly because there is no reason to promote it any more. It's still selling more than pretty much everything that isn't SAO) And that (the LN sales) is while the Re:Zero anime was on air. You can expect that to drop in the next years if there's no anime on air while new books gets published. And no, KonoSuba was not a splitcour, unless the Author lied about it. It was innitially decided to be 1-cour, just 1 season and they decided midseason to make another season at the end of it because of how successful it was (or so I'd assume). There's even a blogpost from the author about how that all happened really sudden and he was just told about it out of nowhere. Can't be bothered to search for it... but I think it was on his blog... so if you want to you can look it up if you can read japanese. Actually now that I think about it it might have been a tweet from someone and not a blogpost... i don't really remember but the story should be true no matter what. Last edited by aifhak on Thu Jun 15, 2017 10:48 am; edited 1 time in total |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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While I agree that overseas revenue is a bigger deal than some people think, it would take at LEAST something like another 4-5 years for that to "matter" if ONLY because of the "hidden" problem in the charts you linked, which is 2005-2006. It's all well and good to say "anime studios can rely on foreign dollars to fund production", but Japan has been there before and then got kicked in the 'nads when the market crashed. I figure you'll need at LEAST half a decade of sustained funding for the Japanese side to feel that foreign monies are a "reliable" source of income. And even then, I wouldn't count on it. Consider that America has been bouncing in and out of the Japanese animation industry fairly regularly since at least the late 70s early 80s. |
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Jonny Mendes
Posts: 997 Location: Europe |
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In the case of LN if you go by franchise you can't go to single volumes sales. You have to go by series because is the series overall performance that the publisher is looking at. When they decided to made a anime. is not to promote the sales of a single volume but the sales of all volumes of the series. Top-Selling Light Novels in Japan by Series: 2017 (First Half) #3 540,806 Re:Zero #6 299,957 The Irregular at Magic High School #15 137,160 No Game No Life Of course that number depends on number of volumes available, Re:Zero have 11 and Mahouka 21 . And in the case of Re:Zero the anime is recent, and that helps. But as a franchise and popularity, Re:Zero is beating Mahouka right now. If you go to Japan and Comiket you would be amazed how big is Re:Zero now. I Had passed by more that 100 Rems in the cosplay part. Also the quantity of doujins is also amazing. Now, if the movies can help the growth the franchises that become less dependent of the publisher, maybe we can have second seasons. I hope so, because i can't see the publisher spend more money in a anime of a series that is already that popular and have good sales. About the sales of DxD is probably right. the third season was the weakest of DxD because of the changes they made in the plot. That almost killed the anime. Glad they decided to get another season to see if is still popular enough. I didn't know that about the KonoSuba , Thanks for the info. |
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aifhak
Posts: 57 |
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look I've been trying to be polite my last 2 posts but you have no idea what you're talking about here. You're comparing the sales during half a year during which an anime aired to something that didn't have an anime in years. I get it, you like ReZero and want to make an argument about why it's so special that it absolutely gets another season while other things don't because you want it to be "better" than everything else. Yes, ReZero is popular right now and sold a lot but everything that has a popular anime is popular while the anime is airing. The sales will not stay that way in half a year. They're not going to sustain those sales because noone is going to buy those vol 1-10 releases anymore now that they've all got them. Like, you're saying that Mahouka with it's 21 volumes has an advantage because ReZero has only 11 volumes when it's the exact opposite. ReZero is NOT going to keep selling across the board and as time moves on the only things it will be selling a lot is new vols, as is the case with EVERY series out there. EVERY series. Monogatari shows up in the rankings as well but not because they're selling a crapton of Bakemonogatari but because new vols come out that still sell really good. That's the point. Just have a look at what sales were for Mahouka (the LNs) in the year the anime aired and compare that for crying out loud. Never mind, I'll just do that for you
There is NO argument you're making. You're saying stuff like ReZero is OBVIOUSLY getting another season because of it's LN sales because it's selling so much. And yet you're also saying that stuff like Kagerou Days that sold almost twice as much or stuff like Mahouka that still sold way more is obviously not getting one because it never was popular enough?!?! Look, all I'm saying is that this "LN/Manga sales are everything that matters" bullshit is putting it way to extreme. Yes it's important but no it's not everything that matters. I can name a shitton of series that sold better and if we're going by your argument they'd all have to have a second season by now. But they don't |
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maximilianjenus
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but, as stated previously, ti's because of two factors.
a) they have ceiling, when the publisher thinks the LN/manga can't sell anymore it sees no point in throwing more money in making more anime. b) there is a limited amount of aniem studios/producers, while the publishers have a lot of mangas/novels, so rather than making mahouka season 02, the publisher prefers to make rezero s01 (not sure if it's the same publisher, bear with that), since the money and people they could spent in making a stablished property more popular, can be used instead for a new property. I also wonder how many studios can actualyl profit from disc sales, like , does shaft do it ? since that would explaina few things that have happened, like monogatari/madoka saving them from bankrupticy and shaft mostly working in monogatari stuff. I also remember reading that shinbo himself gets a cut from disc sales. |
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aifhak
Posts: 57 |
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yeah but that's kind of the point I'm trying to make.
It's way better for most publishers to spread out their spending and have lots and lots of different s1's because usually a season2, season3 etc won't give them anywhere near as much as the original s1 gave them. Hence the statement that LN/Manga sales are everything that matters to decide wether or not a s2 happens being just some hindsight 20 / 20 that you can replace with anything else like discsales, robot-toy-sales or whatever else that cynical people just end up saying after the fact, claiming it was obvious while ignoring all the cases that go against everything they say. |
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Jonny Mendes
Posts: 997 Location: Europe |
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Look. We are going in circles I never said that LN sales matters most in all the cases. There are exceptions like the ones i refer. Matters most if we talking about publisher investment in new seasons. But is pretty rare to a publisher to invest in more than 2 cours. There are to be more investors that take the place of the publisher. If depended on the publisher, SAO, D X D Shana and Zero no Tsukaima would stop in season 2. And in the case of Mahouka vs RE:Zero even if love both but I would prefer another Mahouka season. Just that, right now Re:Zero have the advantage and is more likely to have another season. And Mahouka is having a movie. Lets wait to see what will happens after the movie You have your opinion and i have mine. I respect your opinion, just is different from mine. Last edited by Jonny Mendes on Thu Jun 15, 2017 2:13 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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DRosencraft
Posts: 671 |
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I think another angle people are missing is that this isn't just a problem for anime and manga in Japan. Obviously that is the focus here on this site because that is the audience being spoken to here, but this issue is also common in the 3D visualization and animation field in general. My brother who went to school and got his degree in 3D animation, computer graphic design, and visualization, would tell me the horror stories all the time.
Look at the animation studio that did Avatar a few years back, Digital Domain. Those folks won an Emmy for their work on that movie and were bankrupt literally the same day they were getting the award because the economy in this field is just that poor for people doing the work. While the situations are a bit different, the underlying problems are the same - there is not the willingness by the ones writing the checks, or the consumers, to stomach the kind of rise in prices that need to occur to make the conditions for the average person doing this work, better. And again, it goes beyond just the realm of movies and TV. Even the folks doing something like visualizations for some company's latest product so some exec can take a look at it, have to deal with ridiculous deadlines that keep shifting, workloads of multiple projects with similar or identical deadlines, working far more than 40 hours a week, and for less pay than one might expect. Again, I know the focus here is on the anime and manga industries, but the point I'm trying to make is that it is a problem that goes far beyond just Japan and its animation industry. Squeezing the anime industry via shrinkage of the number of productions by some artificial quota is not going to really address the problem in the way I feel people think it will. Those folks will either find themselves out of work, or in some other closely related field where the same problems exist but with less fanfare. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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Like most any entertainment (video games is the cleanest analogue) it is a "hit" driven business. If I spend $1 million each on 10 different projects and one makes $9million but the others each make only $100k, in the end I still LOSE $100k because altho the one project was incredibly successful, it couldn't make up for the big losses. The only way that really changes is if the crowd-funding model catches on so everyone "pre-pays" for entertainment before it is made. Without that, you're looking at executives trying to cut margins so that a string of losses don't bankrupt the company while trying to find that "jackpot" hit.
Also, I'm not a proponent of the "production committee" model, but looking at the crowdfunding model (and work) can give one a greater appreciation for the work that the producers need to do to fund an anime (or any project really). It is really easy to say that you can produce the greatest (whatever), it can be another thing entirely to MONETIZE it. |
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SilverTalon01
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No. That is an absolutely awful metric because the only time there are significant amounts of sales for older volumes are after some sort of big cross promotion such as having an anime. If that is how you want to compare them, you need to properly compare the novel sales during the half year following the anime and NOT the novel sales for the same time frame. |
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Hoppy800
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I think the industry should cut down on the anime by 40-50%, I can live with the amount of anime cut in half or close to it. It could increase quality and animators will start getting paid a livable wage, I've watched YT videos of people not wanting the amount of anime being cut in half, since it would make the quality worse, which is far from the truth. Also, the disc model needs to go, merchandise and streaming are where it's at, if they won't make attempts to go back to primetime with most anime, these two options are the best bet and they need to make big streaming splashes in Japan (like on CR or Netflix level).
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configspace
Posts: 3717 |
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^ but Takamatsu already addressed that idea that keeps coming up. All that will mean is bigger risks and bigger losses as committees don't know what investment will do well and what won't. Literally a handful of anime out of hundreds licensed and sold is primetime TV candidate. The rest just aren't mainstream enough. If you go through that cycle a few times, of investors who are burned big by risks, especially if you want the studios to get a larger piece of the pie (which I DO think they should -- but that also means investing in their own projects) then you get shrinking and shrinking productions as risk aversion grows, the need to recoup costs faster because of much higher pay, and you end up with something like the American animation market.
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SilverTalon01
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I think if you cut the amount in half the quality will definitely go up because more of the better animators will be retained while more of the worse animators will be laid off. That doesn't mean wages will go up for these horribly paid positions though. There will be more people around looking to fill a smaller amount of openings which isn't the condition you want to increase entry level pay. Producing less also isn't necessarily going to get proportionally more sales per anime. They're also still going to have to pay to put something in all of those timeslots. The reason most anime is not in primetime is because the shows actually on primetime tv are more popular. It isn't really about them attempting to push for primetime spots. Primetime tv is about wide appeal, and most anime is pretty niche. This is also why streaming may not work for it better than the current model. The problem is exactly the same as what happened when Japan tried to reduce disc prices: demand was not elastic. Streaming works great here because the amount we are willing to pay for discs is massively lower essentially forcing the higher quantity at lower prices route. |
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