How to fix the industry, part 6
OGT and the final word
Are you sick of this yet? I know I am, and it was my idea. But I sent out a lot of requests, and was pleasantly surprised to find most of them got responses.
OGT runs Anime Wa Bakahatsu Da!, and contrary to its explosive-sounding name, it’s a place where I go for rational discussion and well-thought-out blog posts, not to mention the only place I know of where someone is as much of a fan of Real Drive and Itazura Na Kiss as I am right now. I love the site, and I know OGT is a big anime DVD buyer, so I was expecting to love this response:
The problem with the anime industry these days isn’t wholly dependent on the fact that people aren’t buying DVDs (I’m, frankly, surprised that you can still buy a “limited-edition” Haruhi DVD 1 + boxset when I was pretty sure that they wouldn’t be available after a month of sales. Unless the “limited edition” was a sales gimmick, but that’s kind of hard to believe), but a complex problem involving the economy in general, the companies’ own questionable spending ethics (over-saturating the market), and a few other Mysterious Economic Problems are partially to blame as well. I don’t think totally eliminating fansubs and forcing everyone to buy DVDs sight-unseen is the solution, and I still maintain that it’s 100% A-OK to watch fansubs, as long as you buy the series you enjoyed. Define “enjoy” however you feel like it, make decisions based on price point vs. how much you enjoyed it, make sure you have food to eat and a roof over your head, etc.–I own a ridiculous amount of anime DVDs, and question only a fraction of their purchases, but I’d never expect someone to buy more than a quarter of what I have over the years. The best thing R1 and Japan can do–and they’re testing the waters already, in a haphazard way–is to simply beat fansubbers at their own game, and give the audience legal, official digital subs with little or no turnaround and at a small price point. But that’s not going to work unless people actually buy things, digital, physical, or otherwise. Information is free, but to keep it that way, sometimes a system needs to be fed with specie.
I sometimes wonder if sales of anime DVDs are relatively well distributed or if about 5 people buy most of them. I own less than a hundred DVDs of any kind, anime or otherwise, and I generally only buy anything if it’s best-of-breed or I just feel like rewatching. Netflix, or in the past, a conveniently located video rental, is perfectly acceptable from me. But there are people like OGT (and some others I know that I can immediately think of) who buy DVDs like they’re going out of style.
That brings us back to that numbingly-repeatable question: has the current age of internet-distributed fansubs altered that pattern any? Well I, for one, am buying more anime DVDs because anime is in my face a little more, but I could also attribute that to my blogging, since that has definitely sped up my purchasing as well.
As mentioned in some of the earlier comments, we DVD-buying fans are probably not going anywhere anytime soon, and if anyone is attached to the sight of a brightly-colored shelf of DVDs, it’s otaku. But just like the changing music market of the past few years, a host of issues — whether practical, technological, or economic, may make those shelves expand a little slower than they used to.
omo | July 28th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
I’ll say what I always say about these pictures: what makes an amature different from a pro is not how many DVDs they own, but the shelves they’re on.
More DVD shelf porn plz.
Omonomono » How to Fix the Industry: Move On | July 28th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
[...] need to start caring about things that actually matters. Like, having a bijillion DVDs. And for the most part, it has nothing to do with fansubbing. Posted by omo in English-Language [...]
OGT | July 28th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
ADDENDUM: I have a massive fetish for physical objects. I support the digital distribution method, but at the end of the day, I still want a DVD with cover art, an actual disc, a
waste of cardboardbadass box like the Code Geass box, and a useless T-shirt that has seifuku printed on it because God only knows when that sequence of 1s and 0s will vanish from your HDD forever, and, quite frankly, I love having things to collect dust. I’d love, however, to pay for the privilege to watch a series as it runs in Japan with consistent, professional subs, legally. I just want THE DVDs.The satisfaction of purchase is part in that I am paying for intellectual property that I downloaded illegally and therefore legitimizing my wanton piracy, and also because being able to touch something you own is really cool. Also I am a hoarder. Also I am crazy.
And I can provide pictures of my actual collection (it is hard, because it’s on a double-stacked shelf, and I had to get a giant bin that was supposed to fit under my bed but since my bed wasn’t an IKEA bed it didn’t so it’s sitting in the corner taking up a lot of space and put less-used bins) but it’ll have to be email because I do not trust the internet with such things anymore. Don’t ask; long story.
Caitlin | July 29th, 2008 at 5:34 am
College pretty much wiped out the DVD craze for me. I have a fairly decent sized collection from high school but from all the moving around in college, I very quickly embraced the “less is more” mentality. Most of my friends brought as much of their collection as possible and it took them longer to set up/take down and their room became much smaller. I’m still kind of in that mode on the off-chance I’ll be changing apartments.
Jason | July 29th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Ditto for me.
Shameful Otaku Secret! » Aaaaaaaaaand… Fixed. | July 29th, 2008 at 9:02 am
[...] OGT: Mysterious Economic Problems. [...]
omo | July 29th, 2008 at 10:02 am
I like physical object as much as anyone, but I hate those crappy cardboard stuff and worthless DVD extras that just clutter rather than provide any sort of satisfaction. I like QUALITY physical objects. Like shelves made from trees older than me, with a nice finish and hand-crafted details…
Anyways.
otou-san | July 29th, 2008 at 10:23 am
I like physical objects myself, but DVDs have never been something that really got me going. Even with music, I always prefer records to CDs, and I’d rather have mp3s than those little plastic things. Seeing as how there are no equivalents to records for movies, digital is fine by me, with a few exceptions.
Jason | July 29th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Philistine! :p
OGT | July 29th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
I’d rather have mp3s (or ogg, or FLAC), too–they’re convinient, 30GB of them fit in my pocket rather nicely, and it’s nice having that variety. Same with videos–it’s easier to click a mouse button and open a video than stick in a DVD and use its menu interface and seek ability to get to where I want to be.
But I also live in perpetual fear of a hard drive crash, where all my data is lost and I have to hunt rare stuff down again. In that case, I’d rather have the CDs handy, since I can just pop them in and rip them straight to my preferred format of the moment. CDs/DVDs don’t last forever, either, even when properly kept, apparently, so there’s no way to escape that–but it’s much less likely that you’ll lose all your DVDs in one single moment of painful disc grinding.
It pretty much comes down to convinience, and I wouldn’t mind official, legal DVD-quality .mkvs of series that I could burn to DVD myself–but I still think spending money and getting something more perceptible than electron states is pretty cool.
Jason | July 29th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
And people think I’M lazy.