Forum - View topicAnime vs. The 1980's Video Game Market.
|
Goto page 1, 2 Next |
| Author | Message | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Kaolin_Yatsura
 Posts: 64 Location: Texas |
|
|||||||
|
All right so while reading the news feed about Iwata-san I was having this thought. Is the anime market of today becoming like the video game market of the late 80's? I kind of see some similarities between the two. The market is becoming increasingly more saturated with material that is either already done or subpar. Granted the video games of the 80's cost quite a bit less and that in and of itself is a problem that's already been beaten to death. Does anyone else see the similarities? I think it could be a good thing. The video game market certainly hasn't gone anywhere and in many ways has become better for it. It was something that definitely forced a Japanese market to change. If we could get the same months long lag time that happens for big games like say Final Fantasy wouldn't that be fantastic? Maybe this is just a blessing in disguise.
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
fighterholic
Posts: 9193 |
|
|||||||
|
Demand for anime to me has been on a constant rise, and will continue to do so. While the global situation isn't really allowing for any of us to be in the right position to buy more and more, as well as companies being able to license more anime and then sell it, you are right when things will be changing. When the economic situation improves, I think that there will be more opportunities to indulge in anime spending and distribution.
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Wellness
Posts: 175 |
|
|||||||
I agree, personally I purchased more anime in previous years then I did in 08 due to my personal economic issues, which I am sure are effecting others as well. Which is why more and more box sets are being released, which by itself is far from a bad thing. But most of the anime market really needs to calm down, although fansubs and streaming are certainly hurting it more then anything I suspect it is the growing issues we all have trying to keep pace with changing economics limiting our luxuries and time. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
braves
 Posts: 2309 Location: Puerto Rico (but living in Texas) |
|
|||||||
|
I'll just make 2 quick points: 1) how has the video game market nowadays so different than that of the 80s? Nowadays all the games that are coming out now are just aimed at the "casual gamers" and the crappy RPGs and yearly sports games keep coming in. 2)The anime market has pretty much always been saturated.... There's always a genre that companies just jump on to make some quick cash. Before it was mecha, and now it's moe. The greatness-to-crap ratio is still the same.
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
daxomni
 Posts: 2650 Location: Somewhere else. |
|
|||||||
Well, for one thing it's a lot more expensive. At least to me, paying $60 for a single game that many folks can beat in a single day or maybe two or three days seems a little excessive to me. However, on the plus side the games are a lot more involved than they were back in the 1980's.
I'm a little confused here. Do you honestly think that all games are aimed at casual gamers? Do you really think all RPG's are crappy? Maybe they're just not your cup of tea. Maybe your trash is another man's treasure.
Would you care to explain that? I lived through the 1980's and to call the anime market saturated then seems clueless and careless at best, leaving me wondering just how old you are anyway?
Funny, I was suddenly thinking the same thing about ANN forum posts. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
braves
Posts: 2309 Location: Puerto Rico (but living in Texas) |
|
|||||||
If that's the case, then there's no point at having a discussion about whether or not the market has gotten better or not seeing as how everything can boil down to "you might not like, but other people do". And no, I like RPGs and I even play some those games that are aimed at "casual gamers". All I was saying is that companies just cashing in on stuff that's popular.
Hmm, maybe saturated wasn't the right word. Or maybe not in the right context. I wasn't talking about the amount of anime being made, but the amount of anime being made that's actually worthwhile in comparison to the ones that aren't (as in Sturgeon's law).
Well, sorry. 
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Kaolin_Yatsura
Posts: 64 Location: Texas |
|
|||||||
Actually this pretty much sums up the original point I was trying to make which you seemed to be refuting. The video game market of the 80's was being over saturated with material that was easily produced copies of other genres. This of course meant that a lot of games were easy to get, but that it was increasingly more difficult to find the good stuff. I'd say that this sounds quite a bit like the market today. As for the market as it once was with the exception of the if it's blood and sex filled rule most of the anime that made if over here had to either very popular or something which companies thought would make it over here. So naturally there were fewer titles. They were more expensive and not as readily available. This is very similar to how the video game market started. When Nintendo was first brought over here it was redesigned in order to be "more appealing" to the American public much like early anime which got rewrites. I was merely musing that the situation we are in now feels much like that point where games were being made cheaply and thrown at the market whenever a company could get their hands on them. Obviously people started to get fed up with the crap and stopped buying altogether. Again you already drew that parallel. I personally think that this will help the market just like it helped to change the video game market which is obviously better than it was at that breaking point at the end of the 80's. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
Boomerang Flash
 Posts: 1021 |
|
|||||||
|
The existence of relatively few good choices over a large number of bad choices is a symptom of any collection of similar items that is large enough. This is why many refer to the phenomenon as "Sturgeon's Law." It's true of the Atari era, the NES era, and the vaunted SNES era, and it's still true today in the video game market. Nor is the phenomenon restricted to anime or video games. It's true of novels, non-gaming computer software, furniture, etc. The observation that the ratio of good titles to bad titles is small means nothing; it is essentially the same as observing that the number of anime titles available as become large.
The late 80s came immediately after Super Mario Brothers revived the video game market and popularized the innovation of having multiple screens per level. The auto-scrolling method of game design was at its infant stages in the early days of the NES, in 1985. By the late 80s, game designers have gotten better at level layout that accommodate scrolling. As a result, the late 80s saw the birth of great franchises such as Zelda, Mega Man, Metroid, Contra, Double Dragon, etc. The anime market of today may be creating great franchises, but it did not come immediately after certain revolutionizing innovations, nor would the new great franchises be seen as the pioneers, since there are already many great anime franchises that exist and are healthy. Nintendo's stranglehold during the NES era and their dominance during the SNES era allowed them to impose harsh filters on the games that are brought out of Japan. Censoring, filtration, and localization continued to the PS1 era, where Sony had a much more relaxed policy toward bringing titles out of Japan. The late 80s certainly was not a time when the game publishers were changing the localization procedures--such as you might call a lot of them--to make games closer to their Japanese counterparts. What similarity does the anime market of today and the videogame market of the late 80s share? The selection is large, with all the implications that the size brings. The video game market of the early 80s was large, and it crashed. The video game market of the late 80s was large, and it led to steady growth that continues to today. We will need more similarities that what is already established to make any meaningful predictions on what will happen to the anime market based on the video game market. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
GaryPotter
Posts: 65 |
|
|||||||
|
Really, I don't think the anime market is in any danger of dying. I blame three entities for the recent downturn in the market
Geneon, for flooding the market with stuff no one was really interested in, and on top of that it was too expensive. I mean WTF? $80 for Paranoia Agent? When it should be thirty at most? No go on that one. ADV, for forcing retailers to take up valuable shelf space with a million and a half special edition box sets and re-releases. That stuff is extremely niche, so very few people will actually buy it. Viz, for just plain being arrogant. Not only do they still release edited DVDs, but they convinced retailers that titles like MAR and Zatch Bell would be huge hits, thereby encouraging them to purchase more of them. Then when Viz abandoned them, the stores were stuck with hundreds of titles that were basically unsellable. Really, that's how I see it. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
|
|||||||
I think your mixing up ADV and Funimation. Funi has done the exact same thing, though neither forces retailers to take their inventory or give up shelf space. But Funi will keep the singles on a shelf, then release a box set, then release a Viridian release. Until I pulled the FMA discs a few weeks ago at my Best Buy, we had the original singles, the Viridian singles, and box sets of each season. And we'll be getting in the complete season one soon. ADV at least pulls the old product from places like Best Buy before it ships the new ones out. ADV has also been limiting the production runs and shipping fewer copies, while Funimation has been over producing and dumping product everywhere. The basic reasons behind ADV, Funimation and even Bandai re-releasing titles is to keep them on B&M shelves. Unfortunately, with the cut backs at Best Buy that plan is no longer working. Hence why you're now seeing tons of Funi and Bandai discs showing up at Big Lots and Dollar General. At least ADV doesn't have the resources to over produce and dump product at this time, and appears to be monitoring their inventory more carefully. Funimation and Navarre are getting hit hard by the cutbacks at Best Buy, and will be hurting badly if they don't get their acts together. This economy is too bad for Funi to be licensing everything under the sun, then overproducing the DVD's and dumping them on retailers. Even titles that should have been hits, like Claymore, have had disastrous sales at Best Buy. And don't forget that retailers don't get "stuck" with unsellable titles. They are able in nearly all cases to send them back and get full credit form the distributor. If a title sells poorly at Best Buy, like Lucky Star has been for example, we return excess copies to the distributor and get credit back. And in the case of Lucky Star, we moved future volumes online only. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
freezespell
Posts: 127 |
|
|||||||
Really? I live near a couple of Dollar General stores. Maybe I should take a trip there one of these days and check out the lineup. Maybe I could find a good boxset or two that I could be interested in. I hope they're relatively cheap. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Unit 03.5-ish
Posts: 1540 Location: This space for rent |
|
|||||||
Some mecha was crap, but there's still a lot of decent stuff from the post-NGE era (FMP, Godannar, RahXephon, to name a few). It's the crap like Brainpowered and Candidate for Goddess that started to give the genre a sour taste in some fans' mouths. What is true is that the ratio of bad-to-good is still unbalanced, because, for example, though Shonen Jump stuff is mostly disposable fluff IMO, one of the few shows that bears the SJ name that interested me was Black Cat, which I just recently got. It's a Gonzo series, and it's a standard one-season show, and the premise was different enough from DBZ or One Piece or whatever to catch my eye. You have to be discerning when it comes to sorting through the garbage. Right now the flood may be moe and super-long shonen shows, but who knows, it may be slice-of-life and romantic comedy shows within the next few years. I'm just careful when picking through shows because I know that, for example, Air/Kanon/Clannad holds no interest for me, but I know if it has Gonzo's or Production I.G.'s name attached to it, for example, that it's often a safe bet. EDIT: wow, FUNi/Bandai stuff is showing up in places like those? I have a strip mall with a Big Lots AND a Dollar Store near me. I usually only go there to peruse the hilariously cheap and awful Transformers/Power Rangers/whatever bootleg robot toys, but damn, I'll keep an eye out, now. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
LordRedhand
 Posts: 1472 Location: Middle of Nowhere, Indiana |
|
|||||||
|
Actually yes to the original topic creator I believe you comparison to be correct, however there is a real fear that the industry is in a downward spiral that it will not pull itself out of. Looking at series that should be hits and they are either doing "just okay"/breaking even to poor sales speaks very loudly as to where the industry is.
And yes you can get anime at the Dollar General Store (sometimes depends really the store you go into) So getting Bandai anime for 2 for $6? Sold. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Overlord Z-ko
Posts: 34 |
|
|||||||
|
I would say the early-mid 80's, rather than the late 80's. In the late 80's video games were doing well. I think the comparision mostly has to do with an oversaturated market leading to consumer confusion and a very large amount of growth in a small amount of time. I n the early-mid 2000's anime was getting really popular thanks to a lot of television exposure. This led to the companies liscencing increasingly larger amount of anime each year. This eventually led to oversaturation and a lot of poorer quality titles. The ANime market has also been hurt by less anime being shown on TV meaning there are less new people becoming interested in anime than they used to. Also while I am not sure if this is actually huting Anime companies or ignoring older succesful properties in order to release new ones that aren't so great doesn't seem to be a good long term buisness strategy.
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
LordRedhand
Posts: 1472 Location: Middle of Nowhere, Indiana |
|
|||||||
|
Well there are only so many times you can rerelease Dragon Ball or Gundam or Cowboy Bebop...
So there is a need for new series, now they just have the qualifier of "Good/Amazing" and "Must Sell really well due to lost sales occurring literally within weeks after this series/product was broadcasted on the other side of the world." Which is kinda the problem, the NA market is the investors in the market, and "fans" have not been investing in them so that they in turn can not invest in the Japanese Market. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group