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INTEREST: Trade Group: Manga Pirate Sites Cost Industry 1.19 Trillion Yen in 2021


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zrdb





PostPosted: Wed Jan 19, 2022 11:04 pm Reply with quote
I don't give a shit about manga but it seems to me that the same principals that apply to anime also apply to manga. If something isn't readily available and somebody wants to read it guess where they're gonna get it from?
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Alan45
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Joined: 25 Aug 2010
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 20, 2022 10:13 am Reply with quote
zrdb wrote:
I don't give a shit about manga but it seems to me that the same principals that apply to anime also apply to manga. If something isn't readily available and somebody wants to read it guess where they're gonna get it from?


This article was specifically about Japanese language pirate sites. I really doubt that many people in Japan have any problem with the availability of manga.
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SHD



Joined: 05 Apr 2015
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 20, 2022 10:46 am Reply with quote
Alan45 wrote:
zrdb wrote:
I don't give a shit about manga but it seems to me that the same principals that apply to anime also apply to manga. If something isn't readily available and somebody wants to read it guess where they're gonna get it from?


This article was specifically about Japanese language pirate sites. I really doubt that many people in Japan have any problem with the availability of manga.

Those are primarily for foreign users. Just because the language is Japanese doesn't mean it's for Japanese only, it's just that it's for people who know Japanese well enough to be seeking out untranslated manga in the first place. Lots of them that I've seen actually have information in English and/or Chinese as well.

For that matter though, those sites are available outside Japan. Which is actually important even if you are Japanese but happen to be outside the country, in which case quite a lot of manga/magazines are in fact not available for you.
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Alan45
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 20, 2022 11:09 am Reply with quote
@SHD

I have no doubt that the sites are used by people outside Japan. However, the trade group is specifically complaining about the effect on the native manga market. I assume that if they are able to tell how many hits the sites are getting, they are also capable of determining where they are coming from. My guess is the vast bulk of the traffic is coming from Japan.
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Zalis116
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 20, 2022 11:31 pm Reply with quote
mangamuscle wrote:
By that logic, anime streaming websites should have never become profitable (because even as I write this, there are illegal streaming sites out there), but they are and if a decade ago no one had invested in crunchyroll, probably today.the legal anime streaming industry outside japan would be as dead as Daisuki.net.


Well, there is some percentage of the anime viewerbase that're actually anime fans, who actually place some intrinsic value on anime as content they love and are willing to pay for it. Some subscribe to CR, Funi, or a different site because they're willing to pay for some percentage of what they consume, but since anime piracy in well-served areas is a pricing problem, they pirate if they're asked to pay more than X amount.

Top Gun wrote:
You're blissfully skipping right over the fact that Steam actually worked. [...] After Steam got over its initial growing pains, what did it offer gamers? A single unified place to purchase just about any PC game they wanted, with barely-noticeable DRM, and all sorts of ancillary social features to boot. Why would most people bother to pirate a game when it was far easier to make a few clicks in a storefront, where they could get it for 75% off retail during a holiday sale? While certainly still existent, piracy is nowhere near the albatross around the neck it once was for the PC gaming industry. Be glib all you want, but Gaben was right.


Well, nothing screams "piracy isn't a pricing problem" quite like "we need to routinely slash prices by 75% to entice people to pay." But actually, I don't deny that GabeN was right... about PC gaming. I don't deny that Steam worked... for PC gaming. But that's because of the technical nature of the medium, which allows ways (like the features you mentioned, or multiplayer servers that exclude pirated versions) for game distributors to actually offer "a service that's better than the pirates." Those avenues aren't available in the anime/manga sphere, where it's "pay money, click a link, watch a video / view images" vs. "click a link, watch a video / view images For Free."

Top Gun wrote:
As it stands, I buy a lot of physical copies of anime. But if there were the anime equivalent of Steam, where I could purchase local digital copies of a series that I could keep forever and back up as I chose? I'd be all over that in a heartbeat. [...] Downloading a file of an episode offers tangible benefits that a streaming service can never offer me as an end-user...

I don't doubt that you and some others would make use of a "Steam for Anime" (or manga) type of service. But I've seen the numbers in the broader piracy scene, where episodes get millions of views on illegal streaming sites, but only 50k-100k downloads. "Archival-quality" Blu-Ray rips get even fewer downloads than that. So if there's barely any "market" for digital downloads when they're free, where is the demand for a paid, download-to-own service? Through the view counts on illegal sites, the vast majority of pirates have shown that they're mainly interested in watching stuff as it comes out and moving on to the next season, not owning or collecting titles. I don't see things being much different for manga; readers are mainly going to illegal reader sites, not downloading .zip/.rar chapters like back in the 2000s.

Thus, the "we need Steam for Anime / Steam for Manga to combat piracy" sentiment is not based on any evidence-based assessment of the piracy landscape. Rather, it's a faith-based or religious belief that some mystical, inscrutable Quality of Steam will somehow win over the pirates, even when any pay-per-episode/show/chapter/volume system will inevitably be more expensive than the current subscription regime... which the "Not A Pricing Problem" crowd considers onerously expensive.

Hinotoumei wrote:
Actually, many high profile series popular in japan never see an English translaton that is made accessible digitally to the public " legally"

berserk, inuyasha etc etc.
This is what's called "moving the goalposts." Can you go buy an English print copy of Ayakashi Triangle to compensate for Viz/Shuueisha not putting chapters 74-75+ on their site? No; AT's unavailability is a genuine Service Problem. But Inuyasha's been completely released in print for over a decade, and Berserk is pretty close to caught up with the Japanese release. Those are not cases where the publishers have deliberately decided to make content unavailable for censorious reasons.
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zrdb





PostPosted: Sat Jan 22, 2022 7:18 pm Reply with quote
All I can say it that if I wanted to read a specific manga title (and it really doesn't matter where-japan, the us etc.) that wasn't available where I was I'd get it by any means available.
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