So while I know that obviously DS was trying to razz me (hence the =P), I feel like part of my mindset is because I can look at doing things the “legit” way and still not having it matter because the legit way still doesn’t actually work. That’s what I wanted to get at with my whole “bad consumer” part. My dirty little secret isn’t that I didn’t spend any money on all those beloved, precious animus that I watched last year that are so important that you just HAVE to support the industry, but that I got a lot of value for my money. I averaged about one DVD per month in 2008. I bought even more than what I hear people (like you-know-who) telling me to buy when they say “Just scrimp and save and buy that DVD once you can”.
The problem is that even those who were being told to scrimp and save wouldn’t have had to sacrifice much in order to buy what I bought. The large portion of the anime that I bought I’ve bought during big sales, like when DeepDiscountDVD (which is already incredibly cheap) would have a buy one get one free sale, or when ADV used to have seasonal clearance where you could buy singles for like $5. I bet if you looked hard enough that you could find that $3 that I spent on individual singles that I spent during The Right Stuf’s fall closeout sale just laying around. Or you could find that twenty-five cents that I earned Funimation in advertising when I watched a half-dozen episodes of Mushishi online by looking inside of the change slot in a random soda machine. When it comes to Cartoon Network shows, even excluding the fact that mom and dad are the ones paying the cable bill, because of the sheer quantity of television watched the cost of watching anime gets amortized pretty damn low. Watch an hour of TV per day and spend $60 per month on cable, and you’re spending only a dollar per episode. That’s just you, of course. Toss in mom and dad and onii-san and imouto-chan’s TV watching and it might be more like a quarter per episode. And on that note, we managed to pick up Imaginasian over the air somehow and can watch Kurokami literally for free, since they only seem to air commercials for their own shows.
Essentially, if we assume that everyone in that panel room thought that “BUT IT’S TOO EXPENSIVE! I CAN’T!” and therefore didn’t spend anything instead went “Well, I can spend $3. That’s even less than the gallon of gas it cost me to come here”, we’d end up with what, enough money maybe to buy a full 26 episode series in singles with the limited edition artbox volume? Congratulations, an entire room bought one show. We’re now back in the same nice boat as if everyone in the room kept downloading and he who cannot be named bought singles as normal. Again, Justin Sevakis continues to be correct that anime has been constantly devalued and the price deflated to the point where it’s just about zero. I want to feel bad that people’s labor is now essentially valueless, but you just can’t fight the free market.
Finally, this basically encapsulates my feelings of lololololololol at your average AoDVD poster being “forced” to buy the same show like, three times because a company released it three times lolololololol.
(Also, I lol’ed when I realized just now that we have two separate categories for posts like this: “Commentary” and “Rants & Raves”, depending of course on who was writing it.)
I don’t think anime is devalued, at least necessarily. But I’m the kind of person who is contemplating of buying his third copy of BGC and “complains” about being “forced” to buy the same show, like a M in a S&M context.
I do think what failed is people not predicting how the core buying audience will grow. The “devaluation” description is troublesome in two ways.
1. For a lot of fans, anime is already at a value near zero. Fansubs aside, some people are already extremely frugal (like you and me!). But yea. Also, see mainstream audience.
2. More so than devaluation, the gamble for cheap anime fails because demand turns out to be a lot less elastic than some predicted. There was a period in the US where demand went up for anime, but as the category approaches mainstream you run into people who already value TV shows in general at a near-zero value, so unless there was some over 9000 going on with your DBZ (or Naruto or Yugioh, etc), you can’t really make a decent buck with mainstream.
This is really the problem. I think Bandai is still able to push some boxes of their ludicrously expensive special edition boxes, even if less now than before. Companies should not give up on this margin dollars if they don’t have to, as there are fans who like all that useless crap and will pay for it.
I look at devaluation like this:
1) The “average” fan is actually a hardcore fan who thinks that anime is this rare, awesome thing and has no problem plunking down $100 for the Harmageddon laserdisc
2) More fans come in, and these fans have a softer core and a different valuation. This makes the average value drop, both in terms of the median and the mode
3) A lot more fans come in now that it’s mainstream, and yeah these people have a near-zero value for TV. So while those #1 people and #2 people are still around and still don’t mind paying their $100 or $30, the average value is now something close to zero. Which then plays into what you’ve said about completely misinterpreting how the demand would work.
Then, that finally comes back to my problem in the original post that even though you’re in that #1 group and I’m in that #2 group, if they’ll only charge us $3, hell, we’re gonna pay $3! And, like in my original post, I’ll feel bad that people are losing their jobs, but if the whole thing was really just a bubble chasing a mainstream audience that wouldn’t actually materialize, then we’ll just have to get used to just having boutique and niche releases.
ugh must download Mei-chan no shitsuji to push all these stupid non anime posts away
Must have mei-chan no harenchi hitsuji post to read!
That sounds like some sort of hillbilly porno. Do not want.
Well, I always bought DVDs in the old days because back then having crappy VHS tapes was not like really “having it.” Later, downloads flooded the market, but fans still wanted a “collection of anime.” But the massive amounts of forgettable animu have now led many to watch and delete and disdain anime as something to collect and rewatch. But there are some who go with the old pattern and, if they really like a series, will still purchase the DVDs and feel they have acquired something special that has value.
Well, if you count valuation as some sort of average, then yea. But it’s a demand issue or a failure to tier correctly, although you are right in that a lower-tier product will, to a degree, cannibalize. Or so we think.
The total abandon of the higher-margin tiered-releases, logically, translates to a lower production cost. But maybe this is where we need to look deeper. Thinking back to when ADV would release the most craptastic “limited edition” SKUs, it makes me wonder how much it really cost them to put screened underwear in those Aika boxes, and how much are they are paying (especially in terms of opportunity cost of having retailers not stock your shelfspace-hoggers). The additional marginal value they make off them must not add up?
In other words, a properly setup tier system will have to convey very tangible value to those who are paying more over those who are paying less, and maybe that is the ultimate death blow to the “lowering of average value” of anime in the eyes of the fans. This is where I think fansub is no competition (legal > illegal, easily) in the eyes of even many casual fans, but a cheap digital release will cannibalize DVD sales for some.
But I speak as a “h4rdk0r3z” fanboy or whateva, so I am biased.