Mohawk52 said:
She didn't mean that anime in Japan would decrease, but anime licensed for out side of Japan, meaning Viz's licenses.
Yes she did:
Ultimately, if piracy continues to extend to a greater scale and sales of legitimate anime DVDs in the US fall as a result, there could be less anime produced in Japan.
Mohawk52 said:
The losses have most likley been painful enough now to become more hardened in their response.
What losses? I have yet to see an argument where someone proves that fansubs are reducing sales. Fansubs can only harm the industry if the availability of fansubs convinces people who would otherwise buy the DVDs to not do so. Its more likely that fansubs have 2 different effects that could be considered harmful:
- fansubs alter peoples DVD purchasing choices, having watched
Samurai 7 and
Peacemaker Kurogane on fansub they choose to buy Samurai 7, even though they were going to pick PK because more of it was available.
- fansubs compromise a distributers ability to build up pre-release hype, and undermine it if the title is not good.
In fact I have seen plenty of arguments that can explain the plateau-ing anime industry situation in much easier to understand ways. There are a number of things that are industry fact over the last few years:
1. western distributers went mad licensing everything, often titles that were commercially dubious
2. japanese copyright holders raised their prices accordingly; licensing fees have increased by about 5-10 times
3. the DVD buying fanbase has stayed relatively static, a larger number of releases are all divided up among roughly the same number of fans, sales of these now more expensive titles are being halved and quartered. The massive choice is driving the fans towards the familiar and the A list titles
4. premium DVD releases are going to budget collections in a very short amount of time, buyers are being educated into waiting for these, and sales of the main profit-making initial DVD run are being undermined.
5. Retailers are losing patience with niche products that take up shelf space and dont shift. Anime DVDs that dont start selling quickly are being returned to distributers far sooner than they used to be.
Even if you take fansubs never existed, you can see that this is a very bad sequence of events. In order to justify that spending spree, they would have needed the fanbase to double or triple or even quadruple.
The main thing is that most of these decisions were made by the companies themselves on their own. They wanted to dominate the anime licensing war, and be on top of the boom. When that boom didn't manifest, they took other measures to eke out short term revenue which further undermined the sales of new titles. At the end of it all, their costs have risen dramatically, their selling window is down, they have saturated the market with titles and they have undermined their main source of revenue: the initial DVD run.
So when these guys make press releases about the industry and how badly they are doing, what do they say?
- "Sorry guys we screwed up"
or
- "Its all fansubs fault!"
Lets just say that in order to preserve their profit margins after the market saturation and heavy discounting, they would need to have had the anime consumer market grow by several times to sustain the release volume.
Mohawk52 said:
BTW there is this gross misconception with fansubbers and those who download them that it's unlicensed.
Of course its unlicensed. But the word you are looking for is
legal.
Mohawk52 said:
I agree with Paul though the sooner the Japanese studios, or even the US distributors start their own torrent service, or link up on an agreed alliance with the better fansub people, the sooner this problem will fad away leaving just the more hardened fansubbers finally raising their Jolly Roger. Har!
What problem? What problem is fansubs causing?
Prove that fansubs are undermining the industry. Lay down facts. Frankly the industry undermined itself in massive ways. The main point you have to prove is that fansub watchers dont buy DVDs or stop spending money on anime over time, purely down to fansub availability.
Prove that my enjoyment of
Mushi-shi or
Galaxy Express 999 is undermining sales of something that I cannot buy in legitimate translated form. Prove that I will under no circumstances ever buy them if they become legally available.
My gut feeling is that the industry is scapegoating fansubbing for their own mistakes. I believe R1 DVD rip piracy, and commercial bootlegs are far more destructive, but the industry always pins the blame on fansubbing.
