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ANNCast - The League of Extraordinary Supernerds


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Charred Knight



Joined: 29 Sep 2008
Posts: 3085
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 9:53 am Reply with quote
Anime World Order wrote:
The topic of the fandom divide/"con culture" was touched upon as well in our latest podcast, where we discussed Otakon 2010 and gave a more or less spoiler-free review of the film Welcome to the Space Show. You can listen here if you want to hear my thoughts on the situation shortly after it had occurred.

Charred Knight wrote:
Personally I think Surat has said some things I really questioned like how Gundam 00 (a mediocre series) had above average ratings because a series made 4 years before by completely different people was bad.


I would certainly really question that too...if it was anything close to what I had said. What I said, presumably during our decade in review, was that Gundam 00--which I'll agree wasn't spectacular--had BELOW average ratings for a Gundam series in that timeslot compared to its direct predecessors in said timeslot. My speculation was that this was because Gundam SEED Destiny--which was not made four years before--was such a letdown that people lost faith.

Other people already elaborated on the nature of Gainax's change over the years.


Gundam Seed's ratings where the highest Gundam ratings since Zeta. If you honestly expect Gundam 00's ratings to be that high then of course it's going to fail. That's like calling Ironman II a failure because it's B.O was nowhere near the Dark Knight. Series after Seed began to copy the methods used in it, like shortening openings to thirteen episodes instead of 26 or having the ending start before the episode ends.

Gundam 00's ratings where better than the ratings Gundam was getting from the 90's The ratings for the first season was 4.85, in comparison Gundam Wing the series that was most succesful in the 90's got a 4.3. That's why it got a movie. I should also point out that Gundam Seed Destiny isn't hated in Japan. The only reason the movie was never made was that the writer has cancer.

Gundam Unicorn has crossover appeal from people who read Harutoshi Fukui other work which is mainly about how awesome Imperial Japan was. Not exactly the same audience as more recent gundam series.

Gunbuster which while good made heavy use of fanservice, and was made in 1988. The fanservice level is comparable to the level found in Gurren Lagann. The princess maker series which is infamous for it's Dark endings (where you can raise your daughter to be a prostitute) was started in 1991, with the most famous edition Princess Maker 2 was created in 1993.

You can argue that Hiroyuki Yamaga has changed from writing Gundam 0080 (one of the finest examples of Gundam) and Directing Honnêamise to directing Mahoromatic in 2001 but the idea that a studio known for it's fanservice has apparently changed is to me whitewashing Gainax into something like Studio Ghibli.

Gainax in 1993
http://www.kkpmc.net/pm2/pm2_end8.htm

How has Gainax changed from that? Mahoromatic is an improvement!
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braves



Joined: 29 Dec 2007
Posts: 2309
Location: Puerto Rico (but living in Texas)
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 10:35 am Reply with quote
The best part of that LA Times article for me was them interviewing and getting a photo of Hiroyuki Yamashita. It's hard to get photos of animators. Too bad that he gets payed like crap and doesn't even get company health insurance even when he's a great animator.

http://www.crunchyroll.com/media-530554/naruto-shippuden-120/ He did from 09:04 to 09:40-ish

http://www.crunchyroll.com/media-537076/naruto-shippuden-143/ 04:09 to 05:17

But damn. A $10,000 salary for working 100 hours a week for Yokura....
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SoandSo



Joined: 13 Feb 2010
Posts: 204
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 10:56 am Reply with quote
[quote="Charred Knight"]
Quote:
Generally speaking if you have seen the sales of DS games outside of Mario Brothers and Pokemon the sales have not been their. It's a very serious subject.
http://www.joystiq.com/tag/piracy/
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/38598/Piracy-accounts-for-dropping-DS-sales


In Europe. Nevermind where you're getting the BS about only Mario and Pokemon selling, or that your staement about noone making DS games is flat-out completely, factually wrong. Not that that's surprising coming from you.

Quote:
Here's the thing though, how can you support people who decide that they need to sample 200 episodes of Naruto, 400 episodes of One Piece. Yeah, their are people who watch anime to make informed purchases, not everyone has their personal Mike Toole. The problem is that the anime companies are eleviating that problem by offering streaming


Well, as the guys briefly touched upon in the show, how many of those 200 and 400 episodes are even out in English? How many people these days can afford dvd after dvd of all that? How many are willing to spend for that?
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jsevakis
Former ANN Editor in Chief


Joined: 28 Jul 2003
Posts: 1684
Location: Los Angeles, CA
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 11:16 am Reply with quote
Fallen Wings wrote:
But seriously? You liked Locke?
Well then again when I was watching the movie I stop watching when they had an explosion scene and it just had an image of Locke and this video recording of fire over the image.

To be sure, the movie suffers from some really strange and clumsy editing and storyboarding choices, and there were parts of the movie early on where I was rolling my eyes. But I kept watching and, by the end, was rapt, almost despite myself.

I'm watching the second installment, Lord Leon, right now. Doesn't have those issues.
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agila61



Joined: 22 Feb 2009
Posts: 3213
Location: NE Ohio
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 11:19 am Reply with quote
Man, the Legend-squared hat3rz out in force. Its not up there with Giant Killing or Occult Academy in the current broadcast season, but OTOH compare it to the hoity toity noitaminA snoozefest Shiki ... Legend-squared is dreck, but its fun dreck.
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BeanBandit



Joined: 23 May 2010
Posts: 303
Location: Canada
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 11:57 am Reply with quote
I think when it comes to the whole piracy issue the only thing that really pisses me off is when people don't buy and support the things they love. It's one thing to pirate or stream stuff that you wont go back and re-watch or revisit, but I'm amazed to the extant people will avoid paying for things even though they might really love it. Good example of this is Gurren Lagann as I know a lot of people, casual fans and hardcore otaku alike, who absolutely love it and hail it as their absolute all time favorite anime of all time. However of these people I know I don't think any of them actually own or have put a single penny towards it.

For me it just seems the general attitude among people who consume anime is why pay money towards this stuff if I don't have too. On top of that I think part of it is also like Zac stated on a past episode of ANNcast is that it's also a convenience thing of why bother going to the trouble of going out and buying/waiting for the DVD's when I can just download and watch/read something right now. It's not even an issue of money in this regard either and most of the time it's just out of pure laziness or impatience. One thing I have to say though is I strongly disagree with Zac's comment about feeling sorry for kids who cant afford to spend money on this stuff. As far as I'm concerned you can use that that excuse for just about anything, just because you cant afford something does not mean your somehow still entitled to something.

For the record the only time I ever pirate anime is when it's not available for legal sale here (Macross DYRL for example). Another instance I will resort to streaming or piracy is if I want to sample something and see for myself whether it's worth buying or not (which nowadays you can do legally via streams). But like I said my main beef with anime fans today when it comes to supporting the industry financially is that most people today don't even support the stuff they really love. I don't expect people to buy everything that comes out (nor should they) but people do need to start putting their money were there mouths are when it comes to the stuff they care about.

One thing I would have to say to the industry though is that I do think some industry folks have some unrealistic expectations when it comes to the value of some of the product they do turn out. Wile there's a lot of stuff that's worth putting money down for there sure is a lot of crap floating out there. As Daryle would say "the suck factor" also has a lot to do with some of the shrinking numbers and decline of the anime industry as a whole. While I have absolutely no problems slapping down money for titles like Evangelion, Black Lagoon, Hellsing, or heck even $40 for each blu ray episode of Gundam Unicorn, I'm not going to feel bad for companies when I hear of all these mediocre titles falling on their face. This is pretty much why I fell out of anime during ADV's heyday as when I would look at the wall of anime DVD's they had most of them were titles I had little to no interest in. Point is I just get a little annoyed sometimes when anime companies complain sometimes when titles don't sell and turn around and blame fans for not buying DVD's when it's something that probably had no business being released here in the first place.

Anyway just my 2 cents.

PS: Also to be fair to all the moe fans out there, wile moe shows are not my thing the one observations I've made is that fans of these shows generally do buy the stuff. Most moe fans I know and have talked to do in fact own shows like Air and Kannon so make of that what you will.


Last edited by BeanBandit on Fri Aug 20, 2010 12:21 pm; edited 4 times in total
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fmagrave



Joined: 21 May 2008
Posts: 23
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 12:00 pm Reply with quote
There's an old commercial from the MPAA that says "you wouldn't download a car" as a slogan against piracy, but the internet appropriately responded "I would if I could." People will download anything and everything from books, music and movies to food, cars and and houses if they had a device enabling them to do so.

Really, the only way to prevent a catastrophic implosion of the industry is to create a subculture that respects and buys media, perhaps by showing how much the creators toil as you guys suggested, but given that the internet relishes being destructive and hateful, it's not going to be a mass market.

On second thought, perhaps we can shame people to buy stuff by calling them names and actively debasing them kind of like what 4chan does to people who buy things. Make sure they're good insults though, or else, they'll just cloister up without changing.

SoandSo wrote:

In Europe. Nevermind where you're getting the BS about only Mario and Pokemon selling, or that your staement about noone making DS games is flat-out completely, factually wrong. Not that that's surprising coming from you.


Actually, the woes of the DS isn't exactly obscure. Even I've heard stories about 3rd party developers being weary of the system due to low sales numbers purportedly caused by piracy.
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agila61



Joined: 22 Feb 2009
Posts: 3213
Location: NE Ohio
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 12:59 pm Reply with quote
fmagrave wrote:
There's an old commercial from the MPAA that says "you wouldn't download a car" as a slogan against piracy, but the internet appropriately responded "I would if I could." People will download anything and everything from books, music and movies to food, cars and and houses if they had a device enabling them to do so.


What makes bootleg downloaders / stream viewers / manga viewers parasites is that if everyone bootlegs, then, no, you can't, because it doesn't get made. They are leeching off the buying of others.

Quote:
Really, the only way to prevent a catastrophic implosion of the industry is to create a subculture that respects and buys media, perhaps by showing how much the creators toil as you guys suggested, but given that the internet relishes being destructive and hateful, it's not going to be a mass market.


The question of price points comes in here. If you tell people that $500 a month is required to be a supporting fan, you are going to be able to get very few "supporting fans". If you tell people, a la Crunchyroll, that $5/month is required to be a supporting fan, you have (1) the people who do it to be a supporting fan and (2) the people who do it because they get the streams and don't have to engage in the hunt to get the fansubs.

In the end, if an audience can be built with a broad outer belt that watches things for free, with enough advertising that the streams are self-supporting, to pull people into a middle belt where they pay for access to currently broadcasting shows and a back catalog of titles, and are still able to sell personal copies of people's favorites, that's certainly got the chance of having a large enough niche audience in enough different parts of the world to be a viable business model.

Of course, just the fact that its possibly a viable business model does not justify making strident demands that businesses make drastic changes right away ... given that they are just scraping by and do not have the deep pockets to be able to ride out a year and a half of losses, as Crunchyroll did, before hitting break-even.

One of the things that the ANNcast discussed lined up with what I'd previously discussed on Crunchy forums ... the idea of an "anime mantinee", where for those titles where the distributors only allow them on deadline streams, you release one episode each day, leaving each episode up for thirty days, so that the whole series is up at the same time for a series with a one or two season run.

Given the attitude discussed on the ANNcast, "who knows when a stream is going to go down?" ... this is something that could well move some back catalog DVD boxsets, since you would know that in 30 days, its going to start to come down.

Quote:
On second thought, perhaps we can shame people to buy stuff by calling them names and actively debasing them kind of like what 4chan does to people who buy things. Make sure they're good insults though, or else, they'll just cloister up without changing.


No, just like the excuses are not why the bootlegging parasites behave the way they do, they are just rationalizations so that they can tell each other that being a parasite off of someone else's creativity is ALL OK ... the insulting of those who are not parasites is also an ego-defense.

Finding insults to hurl at the parasites will just lead them to hurl insults back. And, indeed, if they aspire to be useless freeloaders and parasites, the question arises why one would wish to hurl insults at them.

Of course, just like the copyright pirates who take offense when the kind of copyright piracy they are doing is called piracy ("oh, no, its only piracy when you add some restriction that leaves us out!"), simply noting that the useless freeloader parasites are useless freeloader parasites might cause offense among some useless freeloader parasites.

But on the other hand, as noted in the ANNcast, if they are behaving as totally useless freeloader parasites, if 5 in a 100 simply didn't realize it because they were cocooned in a social network fulled up with excuses and rationalizations, and would start to make a contribution if they knew ... then getting the word to that 5% is certainly worth the risk of offending the other 95 out of 100 useless freeloader parasites.

After all, if I realize that my cat has pinworm and give it some of Reese's Pinworm Medicine, I don't really expect the pinworms to applaud the decision.
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mglittlerobin



Joined: 28 Aug 2008
Posts: 1071
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 1:02 pm Reply with quote
Who pirates ANN? It's not like you get a lot of traffic. LOL. That's still bad, but you can't really make money off an ANN ripoff site.
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SoandSo



Joined: 13 Feb 2010
Posts: 204
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 1:12 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
Actually, the woes of the DS isn't exactly obscure. Even I've heard stories about 3rd party developers being weary of the system due to low sales numbers purportedly caused by piracy.


Oh, I've heard about the third-party developers being unhappy over piracy, but I've also heard that's why, instead of straight-out jumping ship as they're apperantly doing with the psp, they're taking an adamant stand with Nintendo in it's bullish stance against R4 chips and whatnot. I haven' heard or seen any dropping off of third-party support for the ds or its upcoming succesor, and it's release schedule sure isn't slowing down. Not to even get into just how much piracy actually is to blame for low sales in Europe(considering according to Nintendo's list of countries most distributing pirated software, only one, France, is a significantly large market.)

It's not rocket science, just look at the numbers. Despite all the piracy, the ds is still doing very well, and the psp ironically seems to be taking much more of ahit from the problem, despite the relative lack of ease compared to its competetor. Not a consolefag or anything, not trying to start an unrelated flame war, just saying, if you're gonna talk piracy, one is very clearly doing worse than the other.
http://kotaku.com/5221988/sony-psp-piracy-levels-are-sickening
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PetrifiedJello



Joined: 11 Mar 2009
Posts: 3782
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 1:48 pm Reply with quote
Story time.

A long time ago, there were two villages separated by a large ravine connected by a wooden bridge. One day, a reporter visited one of the villages and began an interview. He discovered there was a war between the two villages as each blamed the other for the deaths of family members in the middle of the night.

He crossed the bridge to the other village to confirm the story. Horrors of how people spoke about others, what they did which defied respect, and no compromise of peace were echoed. "There must be hope for a resolution", thought the reporter. "This is stupid."

He was about to retire for the night when a massive fight broke out between the villages. The reporter jumped out and ran to the ravine, where the night sky was filled with flaming arrows passing overhead.

The arrows weren't striking their targets very well and the reporter noticed several were close to hitting the bridge. Just then, he remembered he had to be on the other side in order to get home. Fearing the loss of the bridge, he wasted no time and began to cross it.

Suddenly, a plank broke from under foot and the reporter began to fall to the bottom of the ravine. The reporter's scream was so loud, it temporarily halted the fight, returning the pitch blackness of night over the villages.

Shortly after the death of the reporter, peace returned to the villages right after the family-killing-in-the-dead-of-night bridge was changed out for a steel bridge.

This is a personal message to each of the commentators:
Currently in 2010, I have spent $2000 on 50 unique anime titles. By my calculations, this means each title delivered $40 to the system.

A system that, when all is said and done, returns a generous potential of $4 to those who "own" the creative works.
Imagine the potential to those who animate the creative works.

In 2009, a research was conducted to show $1.92Billion was made by 217* anime studio productions. My math shows an average return of $8.8 million per production.
*source: ANN

Please, enlighten your users to how this revenue fails to pay the artists, some of which hold contracts for other licenses. We're all eyes, if anyone's willing to address this.

I can not, and will not, agree to the position piracy is destroying a system which can generate $1.92Billion from anime alone and causes artists to ask people to stop pirating.
(this position subject to change when a valid reason is shown why this amount can't produce titles)

Some may not appreciate this attitude, but it's certainly not a "screw you" to the artist. It's a "screw you" to the system.

The same system which prevents users of ANN from watching legal video streams. (as if the reason matters)

Now imagine all this when people aren't buying titles because they don't like them.

Finally...

Intellectual property is an oxymoron and those who use the term are ignorant for believing ideas are properties which can be sold or bought.

They're worse than ignorant when they believe laws should be created to prevent others from expressing similar ideas even if those ideas were founded by the creators.

If someone believes in intellectual property, their opinion has less value than the pirated material they're advocating against when conversing with me.
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Anime World Order



Joined: 05 May 2006
Posts: 389
Location: Florida
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 1:54 pm Reply with quote
During the recording, Justin had asked whether there was perhaps a "filler-free" viewing list one could use for the original Fist of the North Star TV series. While some of the lamer things added just for the anime are simply unavoidable due to the nature of the TV adaptation, I looked over the episode titles--that's the beauty of shonen fighting shows, you can tell what happens in them just from the title!--and determined the following:

The admittedly convoluted option: watch episodes 1-8, 11-13, 22-37, 39-108 (skip the recap episodes if you wish). That more or less sticks to what happened in the manga such that you don't really skip past anything, and it's what I would recommend people do besides just reading the comics. Still, perhaps you want to cut to the chase.

The simplest, shortest option: if you just want to skip to the point where events of the manga started to pick up, which for most shonen action/adventure series is marked by the introduction of the primary series antagonist, you COULD just skip straight to episode 41. It's a 2/3 recap episode that quickly summarizes everything of significance that has happened to that point: who the hero is, how he met his friends, and what the current situation is. Then just watch through to episode 108 and end it there. You might want to skip episodes 78-82 since all of those are recap episodes. Yep, Fist of the North Star did a whopping FIVE recap episodes in a row but unlike Wolf's Rain, they each recapped different things. I personally wouldn't recommend this option since I happen to like some of those earlier episodes, and perhaps the reason the reason these stories "pick up" once the true villain shows up is that you have a chance to know the lead characters first. Still, even this "shortened" list makes for a 60+ episode undertaking.

Regardless of your option, it's a LOT of old-looking silly cartoons to watch. But it's all online, free to watch via streaming players at Hulu, FUNimation, ANN, and so on. But as I said, there's no telling if someday in the future Toei will change their mind on that, so if you find yourself enjoying it you might want to spring for the DVD collections. $36 for 36 episodes, the very embodiment of the "a dollar per episode" price point I alluded to in the episode.
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Megiddo



Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Posts: 8360
Location: IL
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 2:08 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
Who pirates ANN? It's not like you get a lot of traffic. LOL. That's still bad, but you can't really make money off an ANN ripoff site.

ANN is ranked around 3000 for Alexa, which is quite a bit of traffic. For example, Crunchyroll is around 2300. So it's not too surprising there are clone-sites out there, though you are correct that there's little to no monetary possibility out of such clone-sites.
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Zac
ANN Executive Editor


Joined: 05 Jan 2002
Posts: 7912
Location: Anime News Network Technodrome
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 2:16 pm Reply with quote
Megiddo wrote:

ANN is ranked around 3000 for Alexa, which is quite a bit of traffic. For example, Crunchyroll is around 2300. So it's not too surprising there are clone-sites out there, though you are correct that there's little to no monetary possibility out of such clone-sites.


I think he was joking. We do just fine around here, traffic-wise, especially in comparison to similar sites.

People do the copy/paste thing in the hopes of driving enough traffic to generate interest from advertisers; obviously this plan is very poorly thought-out.

Also, PetrifiedJello, I'm not reading any of that.
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jsevakis
Former ANN Editor in Chief


Joined: 28 Jul 2003
Posts: 1684
Location: Los Angeles, CA
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 2:58 pm Reply with quote
PetrifiedJello wrote:
Story time. (bizarre non-sequitur story deleted)


WTF man.

Quote:
This is a personal message to each of the commentators:
Currently in 2010, I have spent $2000 on 50 unique anime titles. By my calculations, this means each title delivered $40 to the system. A system that, when all is said and done, returns a generous potential of $4 to those who "own" the creative works.
Imagine the potential to those who animate the creative works.


You lost me at that last one. Where did the $4 figure come from? Also, you don't define who you deem to be the "owners" (is it the producer companies in the production committee that put up the money? The work-for-hire anime studio? The individual artists on staff? The guys in the US who made the dub? The translator? Do none of these guys deserve money? Or just the original manga artist?) You also make no mention of how MUCH anime you got for that average of $40 per show. Was it a whole 26 episodes? Gotta remember production costs average around US $200k per episode. Revenue ≠ profit.

Also, you may have (attempted to) compute the royalty, but the royalty is usually small to the point where people don't pay too much attention to it. The real money comes in the up-front license fee someone like Funi or Bandai Ent would pay the licensor. THAT'S where people actually get paid from. Or used to, at least.

Quote:
Please, enlighten your users to how this revenue fails to pay the artists, some of which hold contracts for other licenses. We're all eyes, if anyone's willing to address this.


Your question is wonky, but it works like this:

1. Sponsors (in committee form) pay US $4-7M to produce a show. (26 x 200k = $5.2M) Sponsors can be anyone who might make money from the property, including DVD companies, TV networks, toy and game licensees, music companies, the original manga publisher, etc. The planning producer (what often gets credited as kikaku, 企画) will also pony up their own money, which they hope to recoup from overseas licenses, future royalties, etc.

2. The original creator (gensaku/原作) gets an up-front payment for this, plus a promise of royalties on everything that comes out of it.

3. Animation production company gets paid from the budget to do the work, sometimes while funds are still being raised. This payment is for this particular job, from the overall production budget, and from that, they pay their freelance artists and staff.

4. The sponsors recoup their money by exploiting the rights they got as part of the deal. The toy companies sell toys, the music publisher sells OSTs, etc.

5. The planning producer also adds in money from licensing overseas, including the up-front and later the royalty.

6. Revenues from all of that also get sent back to the production committee, and everyone who was contracted to get royalties gets it from that. That includes the manga artist, certain higher-profile talent (voice actors, for example) and the original manga artist.

There's not a WHOLE lot of wiggle room there. The industry has now seen declining revenues to the point where all the managerial staff has been cut back to the point where everyone is working 80-hour+ weeks.

Now that's how it was supposed to work, and has done for years. Now, with less money coming in, here's where the system breaks down and screws the artists (at various stages) directly:

1. Production starts, but the promised money doesn't get raised, stiffing the animation contractor, who then can't pay its staff/freelance artists. This is happening alarmingly often these days.

2. The DVD company who used to act as a sponsor (these companies have been the major sponsors of anime for the past 5+ years) sees their sales crater, meaning they lost money on the deal. They will not be able to sponsor as much anime going forward, leading to far less work for the animation studios. We have already seen this happen a lot.

3. The overseas revenues don't materialize (low license fees, because the US companies are struggling), or are much much smaller than the planning producer planned for. The planning producer ends up not making back their investment, making it impossible for them to make new anime without dramatically cutting back on both budgets and number of new productions. This has been happening since the bubble burst, and continues to happen as the US market erodes.

4. All the various stages where the "above-the-line" staff and the manga artist were SUPPOSED to see a royalty usually don't get anything if a production loses money, or if sales don't meet certain goals. These contracts vary as various unions and agencies are involved.

5. With less and less companies able to sponsor productions, they simply don't get made. The animators (who mostly work freelance) get less/no work. The manga artists who stood to collect big fees and royalties get their projects cancelled and don't get anything.

This is slightly simplified, but not much.

So you see, it's not a simple process and there are lots of "investment buffers", but from this you can see how lower sales hurts the artists, and how just that is happening a lot. Whether or not you want to believe it is up to you, but I believe this meets the burden of proof to any reasonable person.

Quote:
Intellectual property is an oxymoron and those who use the term are ignorant for believing ideas are properties which can be sold or bought.


..... nevermind.

The whole "information wants to be free" techno-communism argument breaks down utterly when asked a simple question: how do the people who have to work 80-100 hour weeks to make this content eat? What is the incentive for them to dedicate their entire lives to this (and, with something ask work-intensive as anime, that is absolutely necessary)? The only possible answer to that is "advertising", and that's been proven impossible by how little revenue it already brings in with current distribution on TV and on the web. (Ads would also easily be cut out during file sharing, or we'd have to turn the whole production into a commercial, which no one wants.)

So unless you have a decent, currently-applicable business model by which everything can be given away for free and everyone who works themselves to death on a production gets paid enough to eat and have a crappy apartment, let me dismiss that argument as a childish rationale for not contributing to the social contract under which this content is made in the first place.

Unless of course you're willing to admit that, according to your own "morals", any art that can't be made out of passion by an otherwise employed and financially secure person in their spare time SHOULD NOT BE MADE. That includes pretty much every type of filmed entertainment, by the way.


Last edited by jsevakis on Fri Aug 20, 2010 3:25 pm; edited 2 times in total
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