Personal opinions on distributors excised from the Bargains thread (temporary title)

I'm trying my best to remain civil here, but enough with the goddamn victim complex already. Cheap anime on physical media is not a right, it's a tiny first-world problem in the grand scheme of things. Don't like paying the asking price for things? Don't bloody pay for 'em then, I don't particularly want to advocate piracy, but if the industry is better served by fewer people paying a higher price for things and some people paying nothing for them than by everybody paying bargain basement prices (which must be the case, because otherwise why wouldn't all the distributors be doing this? The UK market is tiny in global terms) then so be it.

I'm not paying for these asking prices. I brought 42 anime titles last year, and if memory serves correctly I paid full launch price on just 1 of them. (It was Assassination Classroom Pt. 2, which launched sub-£25 anyway.) I'm very much already following the "advice" given here, don't patronise me.

I believe your assumption that the industry is better served by a few people paying more is misguided. As previously pointed out by myself, if this was the case, why have we not seen Sunrise and NBCUniversal Entertainment Japan pushing their partners down the Aniplex of America route? If this route was truly financially superior, we'd be seeing a lot more of it.

And on the basis that it was just a facetious paraphrase of things other people actually said, I fail to see why I'm out of line. I mean people literally said "The prices are fine, provided you take advantage of significant pricing errors." Maybe it's just me, but that would seemingly indicate they aren't fine....
 
I don't think you're "out of line" Buzz, everybody is entitled to their own views and opinions and that's interesting when we have something to actually discuss - I don't think there should be a "line" anyone feels they have to tow and I'd be sad if they did, but when the level of discussion is basically just people endlessly bitching that things aren't exactly to their liking then I don't really know what there is to say. Welcome to life. Things often won't be to your liking.

Neither of us has the data, but I work on the assumption that the industry does what serves them best, as any business would tend to do. Nobody is going to change distributors minds by simply saying over and over "I can't afford this, you should make it cheaper so I can". It's not going to get me a brand new Aston Martin for £10000, and it's not likely to get you cheaper anime.
 
I believe your assumption that the industry is better served by a few people paying more is misguided. As previously pointed out by myself, if this was the case, why have we not seen Sunrise and NBCUniversal Entertainment Japan pushing their partners down the Aniplex of America route? If this route was truly financially superior, we'd be seeing a lot more of it.

Likewise if it doesn't work better than cheap releases which require negligible aftersales support and push paying buyers to either piracy, VPNs or social isolation during a show's simulcast, I don't see why the companies would even bother making CEs. Everyone from Andrew to Jerome has been unanimous in saying they're a huge amount of extra labour and while it's nice to imagine that Andrew is a crazy billionaire with an office full of clones of himself all doing these CEs for the benefit of a tiny minority of buyers and suits in Japan, it stands to reason that there's a market for them and it's increasing sales within that market which has traditionally been almost completely ignored over here.

I feel like we don't have as much information as would be nice on the Funi titles which is a shame as that presents an interesting opportunity for experimentation to see whether we could cream the best benefits from Funi's very affordable strategy over in the US; cheap multiregion discs available from our own local retailers (and potential access to SAVE shows too down the line) could be really good if it was all running smoothly without the delays and comparison problems.

R
 
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