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Supporting the Anime Industry

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zherok:

--- Quote ---The problem with Anime is the high prices they charge. Sometimes it feels like it is about right since they include a bunch of extras and a nice case with it but sometimes it feels like "Well, this is too expensive". I wish they would cut the costs by half.
--- End quote ---
Americans won't really pay Japanese prices to match their "limited editions" and consequently we end up with more mundane versions, that happen to cost 2-5 times less than they do in Japan.

With anime as niche as it is I can't imagine it dropping by half as an industry standard. Still way cheaper to get it here than it is there.

Bob2004:
You do realise that English-language anime, manga, and games are sold at a MASSIVE discount compared to the Japanese originals, right? In Japan it is all extremely expensive, as is the related merchandise. There are two main reasons for this, though how much each applies depends on the anime/studio.

Firstly, the majority of anime is just incredibly niche. It really isn't that popular. As such, since they can't expect large numbers of sales in even the best circumstances, producers have no choice but to target a higher profit per sale. Or in other words, charge higher prices so they can make enough money to cover development costs in 20,000 sales instead of 200,000.

The second reason, and the main reason English-language releases are cheaper, is a difference in attitude between Japanese and American consumers. Here in the west, we consider it to be entertainment - we expect to buy the DVDs, watch them once or twice, and get our money's worth out of it just through that. The only thing we're purchasing, for the most part, is the experience of watching the anime itself.

The majority of Japanese anime fans, on the other hand, look at it slightly differently. For them, a DVD or blu-ray or whatever is as much a collector's item as an entertainment experience. They buy anime as much, if not more, for the purpose of putting it on their shelf and adding to their collection, showing it off as a point of pride. They buy it as much for the physical box the anime comes in, as for the anime itself, in other words.

Some western consumers do this too, especially for shows they really like, but not to anywhere near the same extent. So since every single anime release is designed as a collector's item, the prices are naturally higher - as collector's items are wont to be.

There are some anime which fall more under one rule than the other. For example, I went to the Ghibli shop in Kamakura not too long ago, for example, and even everything there was ridiculously expensive - if anything, more so than most anime merchandise. Ghibli films are among the most watched in Japan, so rather than being niche, it was purely due to the collector's nature of it. Though Kamakura is just expensive in general, which also doesn't help.

But yeah, my point is that anime is generally priced at a level where it can actually turn a profit, and where it is considered to be good value by the majority of its target audience. That target audience just happens to have a very different attitude to those of us in the west.

Tatsujin:
Bob, you mentioned they target on average 20,000 in sales. Is that PER volume or is that in whole for, say, a single season (13 episodes on average)?

megido-rev.M:

--- Quote from: Tatsujin on October 27, 2013, 05:57:10 PM ---Bob, you mentioned they target on average 20,000 in sales. Is that PER volume or is that in whole for, say, a single season (13 episodes on average)?

--- End quote ---

I think it's both. There's releases consisting of one or a few eps each and there's boxes of those to make a full season or two.
Or whatever the units are.

zherok:
The division of episodes is ridiculous. Persona 4 is two blu-rays in the US. It's ten in Japan. And they cost about the same per volume. It's cheaper to reverse-import anime from the US than it is to buy locally. And while that might not actually be too common, they occasionally end up dropping the Japanese dub from the American blu-ray release solely because of fear that the Japanese market will do just that.

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