Because, you know, anime has absolutely no value whatsoever.

There’s been an awful lot said about the state of the anime industry over the last few days, largely incited by comments from Gonzo and Justins piece over at ANN. There’s been a lot of good reactionary pieces to it, such as Jeff’s entry at Hop Step Jump! and tj_hans at Riuva.

It’s a lot easier to feel sympathetic for the US companies than it is the Japanese. The recent spate of outbursts about the evils of fansubs coming from Japan is really a case of too little too late after years and years of practically ignoring the issue. They’ve missed the boat by at least five years if they wanted to quash fansubs – they needed to be sending out C&Ds years ago if they actually wanted to make an impact. As far as it goes, it was only really Media Factory who took such action, and whilst it didn’t stop fansubs of their works appearing, it did at least impact the visibility of them.

For the American distributors part, they’ve know for a long time that something needs to change in the market. Some hold to their guns anyway, some attempted to make moves with varying degrees of success – the infamous ADV over-extension in regards to licensing was a result of them attempting to gain enough content to start up Anime Network, and Funimation have taken moves with the Funimation Channel and content on iTunes and XBL to get product out there by other means. None of this is particularly ideal, of course – it’s all very America-centric for one (and as a Brit, not much use to me), and it’s still years behind Japanese broadcast, but at least it’s a start. If nothing else, it presents the start of the creation of the kind of infostructure required to get digital content out, even if it is way too DRMy for most peoples liking right now.

Largely, though, the ball is very much in the Japanese court. I’m sure the American distros would absolutely love to get their hands to titles quicker, but even with those shows where America offered significant funding up front (like Kino no Tabi or Fate/Stay Night), it’s not something given to them due to Japans paranoia regarding reverse importation, something completely outdated thanks to the advent of things like cheap DVD recorders, and HDRs which allow them to capture DVD (or better in the case of HD shows) quality

Ultimately, its kind of hard to be sympathetic to Japan complaining about the state of the foreign markets when their own internal market is so messed up. The publishers really, really need to get out of the collectors release mentality the have. For those who don’t pay attention to these things, anime DVDs effectively do 90% of their business on the day of release. Most of these shows will only ever get released that one time as well, never seeing the light of day again on DVD or, indeed, any other medium. Those DVD releases are also, with the odd exception, insanely expensive – I don’t just mean in relation to US DVDs either, but also compared to other mediums in Japan. It’s not uncommon for a two or three episode anime DVD to cost the same as a PS2 game – which do you suppose presents better value?

The thing is that, after the first day of sales, Japanese anime DVDs are worthless. The first print run of anime DVDs in Japan tend to come with some kind of extra incentive – usually a collectable like a figure, magnets, CDs, badges or just nicer packaging. Once those have sold out, buying the release will just get you the DVD, which are very often bare-bones (this is why ADV R1 releases tend to have so much dub-centric extra content – the only way to get extras for the DVD is to create their own). Effectively, the show actually becomes more expensive to buy as time goes on, as you get less for your money – pretty much the opposite of the foreign markets where, once the initial sales have died down, they go for the secondary market with cheaper re-releases.

If you want an example of how retarded the Japanese market is, you just need to look at something like Genshiken. There’s a sequel series running in Japan at the moment. If a Japanese fan planning to watch the TV broadcast wanted to re-watch the first series – which, remember, is three years old now – before the sequel, unless he already owned the DVDs his options come down to buying it new at a cost that works out around $25 an episode, hunting for it used, or pirating the thing via far less traceable methods than those typically used in Western fandom. Which option do you think sounds more attractive? It’s not like this is an isolated case, either – it’s the same situation for Shana. The original series of either show are probably not shifting many copies – if any – by this point either. Seriously, the Japanese publishers could learn a lot about correctly milking at title from the likes of ADV, but as it is they really aren’t making the most of their intellectual property.

Also, the onslaught of mediocre-to-shit content doesn’t help, nor does the saturation of DVD bootlegs on the likes of eBay. In the case of eBay, at least, the US publishers should really be doing more about it – it really couldn’t be that hard to spend an hour a day checking through listing for their titles and reporting on the bootlegs.

But, whatever. As much as us fans like to moan about the market, it’s not like we can actually effect any change in the market. As far as it goes, I buy DVDs – it’s not really to do with supporting the industry or anything silly like that, but rather I buy R2s mainly, if I’m entirely honestly, to collect, and R1s simply because I like watching anime that way. I prefer the experience I get from DVDs in many regards, and I do blind buy an awful lot of shows. The thing is that, aside from the fact that I’ve probably got more disposable income than most fans, I’m also from the generation for whom anime actually had a cost associated to it – my youth was spent scraping together cash for anime cassettes, and balancing the appeal of buying an episode of Macross Plus on VHS against Warhammer 40k miniatures or video-games. It’s kind of engraved the fact that anime has an associated cost to it into my being.

Of course, what buying anime actually seems to get you is nothing but problems, given that yesterday I got a call from the bank telling me that they’d picked up some possibly fraudulent transactions on my credit card, all of which were fraudulent. That credit card I only actually keep for buying anime, manga and games online – I don’t even know the pin for the thing, so it’s not like I can actually use it in the shops over here these days.

I’ll skip the art request moaning today, given that I’ve typed way more than I was intending today already ^^; I’m not even going to bother proofreading this, so it’s probably full of errors, typos and half-sentences…

-edit- Well, that was certainly annoying – for some odd reason, my host stopped serving pages from the directory the blog was installed in – and only the directory the blog was installed in. I’m not just talking PHP files either – .txt, .html or image files were equally afflicted. This happened suddenly as well, when I just happened to be browsing through the settings in order to turn off pingbacks (I’m gotten way too many dodgy pingbacks recently – I got four on this post within a period of a half-hour!).

Annoyingly, I don’t have access to the server logs, so I have no idea why exactly. I’ve ended up re-uploading a WordPress installation to another directory, copying across my config file and renaming the directories, and oddly it’s now working. WTF is up with that I have no idea.