Blade wrote:Are you actually kidding me? The anime industry in Japan is able to monetise foreign markets with absolutely no outlay what-so-ever because of word-of-mouth on the internet and, by extension of that, online piracy. The anime industry in general is rather solipsistic in that domestic performance is always the primary concern, any foreign market money is seen as a bonus.
While true, it ignores that you know, this is an American site, and to a degree we are concerned with how things affect anime for us. And frankly, the Japanese anime market barely knows how to monetize themselves. It's a house of cards built on a small number of fans who are willing to overpay.
Do you honestly think that companies in Japan would have anything to do with sites like CrunchyRoll if it wasn't in-part embracing the consequences of online piracy? Of course they're never going to publicly give any positive reinforcement to online piracy, but it's never stopped them monetising it.
And most of those companies wouldn't get near Crunchyroll until they dumped their bootlegging, and a good chunk of shows on Crunchyroll aren't even the most wanted shows (while it has a few things that are heavily wanted, a good number of shows companies will not put on Crunchyroll, because it devalues them.)
I concede that anime piracy, does however, have a more debilitating effect on Western home release sales, but that's not only down the availability of illegal downloads online but also the nature of the product. Most fans who pirate anime aren't interested in the dubbed material anyway, which when released is often incredibly far behind the storylines in Japan, which in turn makes it less relevant to fans who keep up to date on a weekly basis via pirating material, or watching it via pay-per-view subscription websites like CrunchyRoll, in turn making such sites equally as destructive, yet endorsed by the industry nonetheless.
That pseudo ignores (I say pseudo because you do mention it, but sort of ignore the logic of it) the fact that the vast majority of anime can be watched before bootlegs come out (and that many of the bootlegs are based on these versions,) at prices that are more than reasonable, and a good chunk of people still choose to bootleg. Changing it to 'dubbed material' is a moot argument when the companies put stuff up subbed faster than the bootleggers can, and when the price of entry is so low that it's roughly the cost of a single bargain bin disk a month.
It also become a problem for the Japanese side when you look at it from the perspective that in those cases when anime does have value overseas, it CAN add heavily to the Japanese companies bottom line (even if that rarely happens anymore.) The most obvious current example would be something we are all familiar with, Dragon Ball Kai. A show that didn't do so hot in Japan, but because of overseas markets is considered valuable enough for Toei to go back and finish what was effectively a failed product.
