Forum - View topicNEWS: New Survey: Reactions to Geneon
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Faraz
 Posts: 23 Location: Vancouver, Canada |
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Ok, here's what's wrong with that line of thinking: The Anime industry seems to be in trouble while Mercedes, Apple and Wendy's are not. Because of this anime has no other choice but to try and expand its audience and its market in North America and the way to do this is to offer competative prices and delivery methods to other forms of entertainment available. If at some point Mercedes stopped selling cars and was showing customer losses of course they'd reduce their prices (or offer other incentives) to get back their market share. At this point in time if you show a really great anime that matches North American tastes to a potential customer they'd be intrigued. Then if you mention it'll cost them $7-$10 per 20 minute episode they'll laugh in your face and walk away.
And I know people who wouldn't buy overpriced anime if they couldn't get fansubs so no real point talking about that. What makes me truely believe that that will be the majority case is the fact that anime isn't crack. People aren't addicted to it so they won't be willing to pay any price that was asked. It's a form of entertainment and if the consumer can get similar entertainment at a lower cost, everyone except the most hardcore fans would move to those other forms. Its simple market force affects. Yes, you might love anime so much that this won't apply to you but you have to agree that most humans do not feel such attachments to any product including anime. |
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CCSYueh
 Posts: 2707 Location: San Diego, CA |
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Seems to me the prices of dvds on the History channel & PBS seem to be higher than the mass market stuff. Obviously people pay it. Obviously there is an issue of people will pay whattever to get what they want. Like I paid $70 for Brisco County. I remember Sliders cost a decided good deal more than the prices people are tossing around for Lost. I paid something like $35 for M, a subtitled German movie made around 1930. Hunts doesn't seem that worried about the cheaper store brands even with grocery store shelf prices indicating it's so many penies cheaper per ounce. We're talking vegies, fruits & Ketchup. You mean people might actually pay more for a product they prefer & not just shop price?
Hmm. I haven't attended a concert since about 1987 or so, but someone was saying Hanna Montana tickets are $700? I really hope they were teasing because that is obscene. Wait, Aren't Super Bowl tickets also obscene? Like $200? Maybe more? Not that I watch footbal, but why pay such extreme amounts to see a game live one can see on tv for free? Someone was saying Motel 6 wants $500 for a night's stay for SuperBowl. Don't presume to know what people will pay for stuff. What was it-Guitar Hero this last Christmas? I remember Beanie Babies & Cabbage Patch dolls going for ridiculous prices. Tickle Me Elmo's another Christmas. My daughter paid $100 for Digital Devil Saga off E-Bay, but she totally loves the game. |
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Moomintroll
 Posts: 1600 Location: Nottingham (UK) |
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Yes...but when one of the people who runs the service is stupid enough to admit, on camera, to a reporter from the world's largest news service that he does, quite intentionally, breach copyright, said loophole no longer applies.
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Faraz
Posts: 23 Location: Vancouver, Canada |
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CCSYueh, you seemed to miss my first sentence entirely. You keep comparing anime to successful businesses and then saying well why they can charge as much as they want but anime can't. The fact that alot of people want Hannah Montana or Super Bowl tickets is what drives up the prices. Obviously a lot of people are not willing to pay the current anime DVD prices which is why their sales are lackluster.
We have as much piracy going on for video games but they're continuesly outselling the movie and television industries. Why is that? It's because you pay $60 for a game and play it for 40 to 100 hours. That's around $1 per hour of entertainment and enough people are happy with paying that much instead of downloading it to make the industry highly profitable. That's the exact same tactic that the anime industry has to employ in order to be able to grab a big enough market share in North America to become succesful. When the anime industry becomes willing to shell out as much cash for advertisements and as much effort in making their product mainstream as the makers of Guitar Hero did, and when anime becomes as popular and widely accepted and celebrated as Super Bowl and Hannah Montana, then you can use that argument. Do you hononstly believe that people were still paying as much cash as they are now for the original Guitar Hero? How much money was "Hannah Montana" charging before she became famous? That's the whole point, the anime industry is still in its infancy as far as customer base and mainstream acceptance goes in North America and precisely because of this they simply cannot charge Outrageous prices for their products. |
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Ohoni
Posts: 3421 |
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And yet some people continue to insist that these people are somehow capable of "ruining" the US anime industry.
Scanlated manga is just as available, and just as distributed as fansubbed anime. The two situations are equivalent.
Because the American release is behind by over 100 episodes on the former, and about that many on the latter, and neither airs in subtitled format.
Why shouldn't you download Geneon's product when right now there is a possibility Funi will pick up some of them? Why would downloading them preclude you from also supporting Funi if it does bring you Hellsing? You can download anything you want and STILL buy all the DVDs, if that's how you feel like playing it.
They are. They're ridiculous. I'm fricken addicted to History Channel and yet I'd never consider buying any of their shows at those prices. I can only assume that if they do sell them, they do so more to educational institutions or to the occasional affluent old guy, rather than to a mass market. I'm sure that they don't expect to make massive profits off of their DVD sales. Accept iot or not, the price of anime DVDs is a more significant problem to the industry than fansubs.
You're making unreasonable leaps of logic. First off, any product marketed at teenage girls can be sold at about 10 times what any sane person would pay. There's just some sort of mental cut-off switch involved there. Second, you can't compare the prices of limited-seating live events to the cost of infinite quantity home recordings. It's just apples and penguins. |
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Fallout2man
Posts: 274 Location: San Diego, CA |
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Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I thought the case was about trying to redefine Swedish law to make bit torrent trackers illegal, not to go after the pirate bay admins for personal infringement (though as a product if they won their case against the site's activities being illegal they'd stand to collect hefty damages anyway.) |
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Moomintroll
Posts: 1600 Location: Nottingham (UK) |
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I think I can best explain the relevance of his statements with an analogy: It's like having a law that says the people running a flea market aren't personally responsible for checking that the items being distributed in said market are not stolen or counterfeit or contraband or whatever. They're just offering a service and aren't responsible for the people using it, be they vendors or customers. However, if it was established that the people running the flea market were actively condoning, encouraging and participating in those illegal activities, they could hardly hide behind a "see no evil" defence. They'd be guilty of a criminal conspiracy or of being accessories to the crimes in question. Incidentally, you should be aware that popular, political and media opposition to attacks on the Pirate Bay probably had rather more to do with the idea that the US government and / or US corporations were behind them than with any particular tendancy towards piracy in Sweden. Think of it as the "Bush effect". 
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Ohoni
Posts: 3421 |
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But it's not a "see no evil" defense, it's a "don't care 'bout no evil" defense. The law doesn't seem to require them to be ignorant of any copyright violations going on, it just requires that they don't explictly participate in them. |
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Moomintroll
Posts: 1600 Location: Nottingham (UK) |
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Precisely. So one of the people who runs the place admitting publicly that he does "explicitly participate in them" is legally significant. |
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CCSYueh
Posts: 2707 Location: San Diego, CA |
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Ok, you want it both ways, don't you? Either fansubs advertise anime, alerting fans to new titles, or they are just a way to watch tv shows from another country without having to fly there all the time. I wasn't in the anime fangroup in those days, but I was in the headbangers group where yeah, we did all we could to promote our fav bands. ALl I've read of the anime fandom then seems to fit--you pitched your fav to others to "convert" them & bought it when it hit it big/got licensed. (Unless you were in the bracket I see more downloaders fall into-the "sellout" crowd who felt the minute the band got a national contract, they ceased to be any good. Many downloaders I know seem to be into being the first on the block-bragging rights) I should expect to pay the same price for a movie from Sweden or Germany that few people have heard of? The art-house stuff? In fact, I did pay about $5 more on sale for The Producers because it wasn't a big title.
We discussed this & Joshua agreed he was aware most manga readers don't want scans-they want hard copies. The concept of building a collection. Why should I download the scans which are usually the weekly/monthly when I can get the graphic novel bound with a color cardboard cover & the art touched up by the artist for $6 a pop? Bootlegging manga isn't fiscally viable. Most of us don't have the time to keep up with all the stuff online. Plus the scans I've seen are headache inducing. I'll take the professional job. God knows I'm backed up enough (as many manga-buyers I have contact with seem to be) I killed off Liling Po 7 & Heroes are Extinct 2 over lunch & started on Takumi-Kun 2 & then I have Hoshin Engi 4 & 5 to dive into (& being the cheaper Viz shonen line-they were $5) The issue manga faces is the people reading them in the bookstores which is more a problem to bookstores. Most people I know buy online to avoid the issue (I want a new copy. I don't want to get home & find food stains)
This is where you shoot yourself in the foot. If fansubs are preview & the continuing tradition of the old VHS fansubs, etc., when the title is licensed, the fansub stops. Doesn't matter how far ahead it is. Your excuse goes beyond the "I use it as a preview" & into "I'm just watching the show for free because I don't have the bucks to buy everything I want to watch." Want it subtitled, buy it. That's like arguing it's not dubbed into English in Japan, so they should have groups translating & dubbing the stuff into English overnight.
Because it is STILL a licensed product. Libre made a lot of noise about Be Beautiful having no right to publish titles after Biblos went belly-up, but I don't see anyone else getting the contract. Even though Biblos went bye bye, it suggests Be Beautiful's contract may still have validity even if they can't get new material. I hear copies of Finder have gone for $100 It's like 4Kids & One Piece-they still hold the license on those eps they bought. Funi has to buy the contract or wait for it to expire next year Much like that Earthsea movie thing. Sci-fi has the US rights, so anyone wanting to license it has to wait until their contract expires. Whether Geneon is releasing stuff or not, theur contract holds. Like the 100 or so titles Drama Queen has licensed & never bothered to release
??? Guitar Hero is aimed at chicks? Star Trek is a chick title? If I can't compare them, why do you compare a niche market like anime to a mass-market item like Lost? Anime is more a niche market title like Brisco which I paid about twice as much as you'r screaming about Lost goes for. I seem to recall box sets of Monty Python being $200 when they were put out a couple yrs ago. And why do we get these "Special Edition" movie dvds released with a handful of "extras" on 10-20 yr old movies. Look at Disney. Why aren't their 50 yr old movies going for the $5 price other ancient titles are? |
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britannicamoore
 Posts: 2618 Location: Out. |
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[quote="CCSYueh"]
Because there are people stupid enough to go out and pay $20 for a 10-20 year old moive. Even if they remaster it, its still too much. If Disney didn't have such stupid consumers, they'd never make that much money on their dvds. A smart person waits until people re-sell on ebay, or other sites that offer movie cheaper. And that goes for other dvds too. As long as Adv, Funimation, or any other company can get people to buy @ $21 a pop they'll sell at that price. Some companies seem to have gotten privy to people not willing to pay that much. So volumes of the series are cheaper, or go on sell shortly after they're realesed. People obviously got tierd of Geneon selling @ $25 a pop and not lowering the price. Video games are marketed depending on what the game is. Video game makers are trying to make games for girls to play. As in, Broadening the market. Some games that are now for non-hardcore players such as Gutiar Hero, girls play. So yes, you can say GH is a girls game. it's a boys game too. and for the $80 you drop on the game/gutiar you get almost 3+ years of play. (depending on the system) If my anime dvds did that I wouldn't mind paying $50 for them myself. As for scans....I have to wonder why theres no screaming from Japan on the infintie number of people who read their works in the store without paying a dime. Its like those rats spawn. Its different if they're in a libraray. They aren't. But you never hear anything besides- i'm going to buy it from somewhere they can't reach. |
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Ohoni
Posts: 3421 |
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The number of fans who watch fansubs are not large enough to make much difference in DVD sales one way or the other themselves. They DO, however, generate much more buzz for a given series than any amount of paid advertising a US distributor could afford, so they can definitely raise the sales of a series.
That's no more true of manga than it is of anime.
Depends on who you get them form and what quality they produce. Admittedly the quality is rarely as high as with fansubs, but plenty of them are fine, especially with the more popular series, or if they wait for volume scans rather than weekly scans. Even so, they offer the same benefit that the fansubs do, that the chapters you can get that way are months, if not years in advance of the US version. Naruto, for example, is about 130-odd chapters ahead of the US release.
Well, I'm certainly watching the show for free, I make no bones about that. But a person COULD continue to watch the fansubs AND buy the domestic version. I mean, so long as someone buys Naruto Uncut Vol 5, does it really matter if they in the same week watch an episode that would be the equivalent of Vol 15 or so? The problem is that shows don't release in the US nearly close enough to when they release in Japan. If I'd stopped watching fansubs of a show like Bleach when the license was announced, I'd have had to wait around a year and a half, or two before a signle new episode (new to me) was made available through the official channels (they still haven't gotten that far yet). That's unreasonable for them to ask of the viewer, to wait that long between episodes.
If groups care to do that, they're welcome to it, but I like to watch subs, and I don't like to buy DVDs, so fansubs are really the best option.
You were talking about Hanah Montana tickets.
Because both are DVDs of tv shows? Like the same product?
Brisco County is $70 for 1385 minutes, 27 40-minute-long episodes plus bonus content, which is still comperable to anime pricies. The Monty Python collection is $65 for 1749 minutes of television, which is hardly unreasonable.
"Special editions" are bonus products. In addition to the default. I don't care if they charge ten times as much for "special editions" of anime series, so long as you can get fansub quality versions of them for around $0.50-1.00 per episode. |
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
 Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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A single "fan" can have a huge impact on the industry over a period of just a couple years if choosing not to buy DVDs and feels his or her entertainment needs are met by fansubs downloaded. So you are going to dismiss the effect of the entire fan community who are active fansub watchers on DVD sales? Do you not realize how many people out there are downloading fansubs? Granted this includes most of the English speaking world but typically, and everyone can track this info, {well known download link-to site} shows 1000's of hits per day per title for some of the more popular ones, and dozens to 100's of hits per day per title for most of the rest. I calculate there are about 50 very active fansub groups each putting out 3-10 titles per year. To make this easy I know that Japan puts out about 100 shows per year x 365 days x probably an average of say 300 hits per title / day. That comes to just short of 11 MILLION downloaders / year. No I can't really safely aggree that the number of fans is not large enough to make much difference in DVD sales. Kinda like you can't deny that it's the fans who have supported the industry into existence before the big fansub craze caught on. |
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fran2121
Posts: 4 |
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Yes, because as we all know anyone that has ever downloaded a fansub would have bought the DVD if they didn't have access to said fansub.
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Ohoni
Posts: 3421 |
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Not really. I mean if any single fan can spend more than a couple thousand dollars on anime in a given year then he has no reason to be not buying at least some anime anyways, think of it as charity. I doubt many anime fans spend more than a couple hundred a year on anime, and of that the US anime company would only end up getting probably 30-40%, which they'd then have to share with the Japanese company, so at the end of the day, neither of them would make more much more than a hundred bucks off any one customer.
Not unique downloaders though. Most of those downloads are the same people downloading a lot of stuff. The actual numbers are probably closer to the tens of thousands than the hundreds of thousands, and that's just people who're willing to download anime when it's free and easy. There's currently NO metric to determine how many of those people would be willing to buy anime on DVD when it's highway robbery.
Of course, just as we all know that the largest single purchaser of anime DVDs is Santa Claus, because he has so many stockings to stuff.
Voodoo economics didn't die with the 80's, it just evolved. |
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