Forum - View topicDo you think anime is too expensive?
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GhstDreamer
 Posts: 134 |
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I am the kind of anime purchaser who buys the dvds during the first run. I don't like waiting (I am a convenience shopper) and I have the purchasing power to buy it. I do the same thing with a lot of other things as well like clothes - I do not wait for the sales (I hate being with hundreds of people picking over things). Personally, anime isn't really expensive anymore. I remember those days when purchasing a Trigun dvd costed $70 dollars and a Rurouni Kenshin dvd at Cinema One was like $58.
Besides ordering things from Righstuf doesn't really save me tons of money on anime - I have to pay a pretty high customs charge and need to get enough anime to make $150 to qualify for free shipping (and I usually don't want $150 worth of anime at one time). Then there is the currency conversion and the Canadian credit card companies charging another percentage to convert currency. |
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ven0m57
 Posts: 98 Location: Okinawa, JP |
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I'm in a similar boat so to speak because Okinawa has so many customs checks and import stuff, i'm almost better off having things sent home, then have them ship it to me. I have been dealing with the same thing if i try and order anything online. |
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Animeister
 Posts: 8 |
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buying anime is like buying a piece of fruit, i personally would rather spend the money on fruit.
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ven0m57
Posts: 98 Location: Okinawa, JP |
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haha depends on the fruit. i am totaly digging a pear right now. lol
 but could you explain what you mean?
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Tuor_of_Gondolin
 Posts: 3524 Location: Bellevue, WA |
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I buy most of my anime from a local anime store. Pretty much all of their titles sell at MSRP, so that's what I'm paying for it... and I don't mind.
Why don't I mind paying full price? Because I want that anime store to stay in business. I want the distributor to stay in business. I want guys like Funimation to stay in business. I want the anime producers and studios to stay in business. If I can do my part as an anime fan to make that happen, then paying MSRP is worth it. Furthermore, if I like the series, I almost always want to own it so that I can watch it whenever the mood strikes me. As I'm still sort of new to anime, that means some titles are older, some are brand new. Some series I can get as a complete boxset (which is how I prefer it), others I have to wait... the new way of splitting a season into two is a bit frustrating, but understandable. In all of these cases, the amount I pay per episode can vary widely, but if I want it, then that's worth it to me. Remember that decisions made as to whether to continue animating a series sometimes come down to how well it sells, both in units and overall profits. So that's another thing to think about. The bottom line is that I'm willing to pay MSRP and, unless I feel someone is making excessive profits somewhere down the line, I'm fine with that. If you want the industry to stay healthy, you can't strangle it financially. That's my take on it. |
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zawa113
 Posts: 7358 |
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I can see that for people not living in America that R1 DVDs can cost quite a bit due to reasons mentioned above, but probably because I do live in America, I find it pretty cheap. Most of my disposable money goes to anime, manga, or games. Games have (for the most part) increased in price to $60 for new 360 games so I only tend to buy new games on DS or PSP, where they're $30-$40. Klonoa (Wii) is a recent exception of being a console game costing $30 new (probably because it is a remake of a 10 year old game) and still being totally awesome, but overall, I only plan to buy 1 new 360 game this year (Brutal Legend) because I can get 1 new game or 2 new series and I tend to pick 2 new series (or two cheaper games on DS).
It can easily be argued that the MSRP is $30 or an anime DVD, but with the advent of the internet and internet shopping, coupons, and boxsets, there's no need for me to buy 6 singles @ $30 each. Going through TRSI's bargain bin serves me well and with the exception of being selfish every so rarely and getting a series right away (which I think is fine every so often and for me was most recently TTGL and I haven't done that since at least a year and a half back with Mushi-shi), I've been getting most all of my anime at cheaper prices off of TRSI since fall or so of last year (manga too). In one way, compared to what I could be paying for them or compared to most new 360 games, anime is the clear bargain here, economics can dictate my free time because they will make me spend money on the cheaper things that I prefer. Really, I don't think it only has to do with price per episode here, sure that'll tell you literal cost, but it still comes down to if you actually liked it and considered it worth the money. Would I rather have a really bad show that I paid $1 per episode for or a series that I really love that I had to pay $5 per episode for? Am I willing to wait for the same really good series to fall from $5 an episode to $1 an episode or would I consider the time to wait to be a cost that I don't consider to be worth it? Is money going to force me to wait wether I want to or not so I might as well just wait for it to fall to $1 an episode since lack of money is just going to inconvenience me anyway or should I spend that money right now on a much worse series that's currently $1 an ep that I might be blind buying? Really, I get enough enjoyment for the price I pay that I do consider it to be cheap for entertainment since the price I usually pay by bargain hunting, coupons, waiting, etc isn't overly high anyway (it's much much less than a new 360 game), it's only been $30 or so for whole series for the entire past year (except TTGL, obviously). I do admit, I spend wildly around Xmas time because I'll pool it with my Bday money (which is 4 days prior to xmas) and since I can buy more stuff with that pooled, I do tend to buy bigger stuff (like a PSP), but during the normal year, almost never, but I'd imagine xmas and bday big spending to be common for anyone (mine just happen to be close enough to pool). And at my age (of college student), you usually give people money or let them buy their own gifts and reimburse them. |
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Cosplaybunny
 Posts: 224 |
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Personally I have no problem with the current retail pricing for anime R1 dvds/blu-ray. I've been an anime collector for about ten years now, and I've been purchasing anime dvds since 1999 so my view could be a little skewed. I've payed much more for much less in the past with dvds but mostly with vhs. The current anime R1 (U.S.) market is the cheapest it has ever been, with many series being available for free to view legally online. When I consider the cost involved in creating, licensing, translation, and dvd production and average of $5 an episode does not sound like much to watch/own a series I want to see.
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ven0m57
Posts: 98 Location: Okinawa, JP |
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Do you but from a local store or online? because i still haven't found a local store here yet that sells decent manga (translated). if i have to i will go online but what sites my be cheeper?
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 24092 |
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The only costs you should factor into the price of a DVD are the costs incurred by the distributor who makes the DVD available and the the costs of the retailer (on line or otherwise) who sells it to you. The distributor does not pay for the cost "involved in creating" anime. That cost is paid for by the broadcaster who bought and aired the series in the first place. The distributor does pay a license fee (not an astronomical expense these days), translation (again, a minimal expense - anime translators are not paid very much per script), dubbing & mixing (if a dub is done - again, this is not a huge expense because VA and crew who work on anime don't make much). DVD production itself is peanuts. The main expense to a distributor are the wages for their staff and office expenses. I don't believe there are huge profits in the NA anime distribution biz, but I'd still love to know what the actual numbers are. |
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LuckySeven
 Posts: 587 Location: Georgia, USA |
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At the current costs, I'd say anime DVD pricing is pretty good. But I base that on my early days as an anime fan buying it on VHS. Back in the day, I bought the original Tenchi Muyo OVA series at $20 each for a single dubbed episode on VHS. Just with dubbed anime alone you would play quite a bit, and god help you if you tried to special order it through a comics shop. Then throw in the fact that if you wanted subtitles, you were going to pay 5 to 10 dollars more, you were really screwed. So yeah, I think current prices are fair when I can walk into Best Buy and get something like the complete series of Negima! for only $35.99 now.
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Labbes
 Posts: 890 |
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There are some exceptions where the NA licensor actually did help finance the show. IIRC, this was the case with Gunslinger Girl and either GitS or GitS:SAC - although there, it was Manga UK. Stuff like that was probably only possible in times of big money, and I doubt we'll see something like that anytime soon again. |
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HyugaHinata
 Posts: 3505 |
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I think Animeister's analogy was that buying anime is like buying anything else, but fruit is a necessity, whereas anime is a luxury. |
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Ausdoerrt
 Posts: 481 |
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I think the price of anime depends on the point of view. I'm sure a middle-class American can allow himself to buy anime the way it's priced. As a foreign student, I find anime prices too high to even consider, especially per single box. That's considering that I find pricing for games, books and like overpriced as well - only some movie DVD releases are marginally affordable.
I wish anime market was bigger in Ukraine, but at this point is simply doesn't exist. |
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FaytLein
 Posts: 1260 Location: Williamsburg, VA |
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Actually, I think there was more behind the deaths of Geneon and all than just poor pricing.
Geneon's major failing was that A) they split off from Pioneer to be their own company and B)they were quickly becoming the "niche within the niche" distributor. All of the current R1 companies have rather large companies backing them, and without someone to help pony up cash, living and dying by your own sales becomes VERY important. While ADV had Sojitz for a while, Bandai having itself being the backer, and Funi having Navarre, Geneon didn't really have anybody help them from debt. And of course, back when the Big 3 were ADV, Bandai and Geneon, the lion's share of releases would go to the companies with the most money, leaving Geneon out in the dark, forcing them to license B or C tier titles, slowly crushing them.
Pretty much look to the above. Whereas Geneon could luck out and snag an overlooked gem, CPM was pretty much forced to take everybody else's leftovers, putting them in an even worse position than Geneon. At least CPM wasn't as big as the others in the day, probably drawing out their own demise.
Ah, ADV. How low the mighty have fallen. One of ADV's chief problems was the exactly the opposite of Geneon and CPM. ADV simply went too big, far too fast. ADV was famous for picking up a handful of A list titles, then picking up a couple of weaker series in an attempt to offset loss. Couple that with the attempted in house merchandising arm, their manga efforts, Anime Network and Newtype magazine was simply far too much of a financial strain for a lone company to bear. They tried joining with Sojitz, only to have that deal break up and most of the titles make their way over to Funi. ADV is living off their catalog now, which isn't a good long term plan. The preferred use of singles surely helped knock these guys out, along with pricing, but there were other things involved too. And as for myself, I buy from the place offering the best price, which was almost always $20 to $25 a disc which almost always came out to be $4-5 an ep, which is a real good deal, especailly when you look at the R2 market, which would often be twice the price for half the eps. Is anime expensive? Yes. But it kind of has to be. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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Ahh, GitS:SAC. Otherwise known as "Manga UK's affordable show". I'll agree that unless major tweaks are made to DVD strategy -Beez are the company to watch as regards this- Region One is still the best place to find good deals. |
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