[relentlessflame]

Originally Posted by Reckoner

Yes you're right, but you should also consider why perhaps the US market might have collapsed. They assumed at first that the US market is like Japan, that we would be willing to spend exorbitant prices on anime. They were charging companies like Geneon HUGE licensing fees to distribute anime here.

That's not really why, though. Anime in the West was always substantially cheaper to consumers than in Japan, and in the time since the Western anime industry collapsed, prices have dropped even further (as you said). One of the reasons that precipitated the fallout was that the perceived value of anime kept dropping as companies like ADV kept trying re-releasing titles as boxsets right on the heels of the Single release, to try to push out more inventory (to meet licensor quotas) and at the request of big box stores who didn't want there to be so many SKUs.

They were charging Geneon huge licensing fees because they assumed the customer base was there to support. As with most bubbles it seemed at the time that the market had nowhere to go but up. After all the U.S. is double the size of Japan in terms of population. But anime was a "fad" rather than an enduring cultural element. Once the bubble burst, people realized that the remaining customer base was small. It remains a small but not insignificant niche market to this day, and I would suggest that has nothing to do with the price tag. There were more people buying anime back when it was more expensive than there were when it dropped substantially (but raising the price obviously isn't going to bring those people back either). This wasn't all directly correlated with any other financial events either.

Originally Posted by Reckoner

Problem is that the consumers of anime in the west tend to be much more pragmatic. We rather pay a cheap subscription to a place like Crunchyroll, and then if we like it enough choose to but the boxed sets when they are sold at a reasonable price.

I think Western anime consumers are not that much more "pragmatic". Japanese customers in most areas have the option of renting, which has basically gone by the wayside in the U.S. (absent Netflix and things like Redbox). Anime is of course also more accessible on TV (though still not terribly accessible), and there are Japanese online streaming services that stream anime as sort of Video-on-demand. There are plenty of ways to watch anime that don't involve paying large amounts of money to collect it. And I would also point out that the Japanese economy hasn't been "hot stuff" either for much of the last decade or two, so it's not like it's a case of boom economy vs. bust.

When the market collapsed in ~2006, it was way before services like Crunchyroll went mainstream (Youtube had just started the year previous). Some say it was due to fansubs, but fansubs were around when the market was booming as well.

And besides, even if all that you're saying were true, what does it say? You have one market that is more willing to spend a huge amount of money on their niche hobbies, and another that is too "pragmatic" to buy anime even at the now-reduced pricing. What market are you going to focus on? And why is the answer to lower the price further in the market that is willing to pay? In a niche business, lowering the price isn't necessarily going to increase your sales enough to make up for the drop in revenue. (And keep in mind that, if sales rise, so will the licensing fees.)

Originally Posted by Reckoner

Of course comparing the US market's style of consumerism to Japan's is very limited, but like I said before... The anime industry seems to be the only one that is becoming more insular. To be more specific, it is the only one where the price of physical media seems to be going up instead of down. I am not convinced that it has to be this way though.

I think the claim that the anime industry is becoming more insular is difficult to prove, particularly if you consider the output of the last few years. If you actually do a breakdown of the content and consider the target audiences, there seems to me to be a pretty large spread of content that appeals to different interests and demographics. I'm sure you could point to some shows that were more-present ~7-10 years ago, compare to today, and then say that the lack of these sorts of shows suggests that the market is lacking in diversity... but I think that's inconclusive. Trends change after all.


Anyway, this topic has been done before, and a recent example is here.