[4Tran]

The post that you linked to doesn't seem to be as significant as you allude. The emphatic part of the post is to emphasize that there's no solid information about how well the Simoun DVDs sold, and that anecdotal information is of questionable value. If Media Blasters had expected that Simoun would get great sales, they would have released a dub for it. Since they didn't, it's obvious that they knew that its sales would be modest at best. I don't expect Simoun's sales to be very good either, but this post doesn't prove anything either way.

There are a couple of rules of thumb to note here:
1. Even if information comes from a reputable source, it doesn't carry all that much weight unless it has a link to verifiable facts. The reason here is that words aren't precise, and it's possible to misread them.

2. DVD sales in North America are private information (with the partial exception of Funimation), and there are only two ways to find out what they are. Either the licensor releases the information, or it has to come from resellers. In the case of the former, you'll only hear about when a series does well, never when it does poorly, and in the case of the latter, the information is usually very localized (sales at a particular store, for example). If someone is privy to priviledged sales information, you can bet that that person won't reveal it, because they would be in deep doo doo.

As far as licensing experiments go, R1 companies still do it to a fair degree (Marimite season 4 for example), so it seems to be either a viable move, or it makes the best of a bad economy.