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Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Disc World
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mdo7
 Posts: 8218 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Interesting TWIA segment, and when it comes to physical media vs streaming: for me, physical media always win no matter what!!!
Also, I got some good news and hope, a recent LA Times article has reported that Gen Z demographic has started to buy and rent physical media like DVDs, and Blu-rays, and it also extends to VHS tapes too (I'm not making this up, folks). Gen Z continue to amaze me when it comes to retro revival including technologies from the 90's and early 2000's, and cultural trends. So I wouldn't be surprised that Gen Z anime fans assuming they're part of the retro revival could bring back anime on physical media by buying them assuming that trend could hold. |
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PilotPayback
 Posts: 137 |
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oh boy....um...damn...there's a lot to unpack opinion-wise. i'm mostly going to be covering visual novels because i have a lot of feelings there.
as a visual novel fan, i've gotta lament the difficulty in getting physical media, and i don't mean physical copies of visual novels in general (because almost every major release gets them in japan), i'm talking about OUTSIDE of japan. last time a game i was interested got a physical release was welcome to a [blank] open world by moonstone, and even then, mangagamer didn't do a physical release for that, it was just a physical usb with an activation for the game. i honestly really wanna see more visual novels release physically - despite being a digital user these days - because even though i do trust that jast and mangagamer and nekonyan will last and since their games are drm free, i don't think i'll need to worry about them...who knows? giga games are tough to play these days because their website got shut down...or at least from personal experience... then you have companies like shiravune, and i...don't even know if the company did a SINGLE physical release for a visual novel despite licensing some pretty big stuff like to heart and the upcoming (and game i'm interested in) gyaru fiction. i could import japan physical releases of visual novels, but that's a pain and is expensive...i am waiting for an import right now for a drama CD for hamidashi creative (based off of ryuukan ameri, my favorite character in the game)...but i wanted to get that physically but no vender would bite. i actually remember recently there was a firefight on that one platform named after a letter in the alphabet over the inability to get japanese goods,.and i felt visual novels were the perfect example of that. reminder: i'm only really talking about LOCALIZED visual novels getting physical releases, because we rarely get them. like, it's nice to get these games on steam, jast, mangagamer and denpasoft, but, as someone.who owns a copy of returnal and is planning on pre-ordering saros, i sometimes wanna buy games physically... this is coming from the same guy who bought battlefield 6 physically and sold it later on because it just wasn't for me, but i don't know if saying that brings me rep down or up... |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 5345 |
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There are so many advantages of physical. Licenses expire only to be deemed not worth the renewal, or you have companies like Aniplex deciding to simply not do anything with them. It doesn't happen often, but if the service is down, then you watch nothing and won't be compensated for that gap in the month you paid for unless it was something especially long.
Home video may be contrary to what Crunchyroll and other streamers want, which is to keep you coming back every month, but I think the anime side of things is a bit different from the general attitude out there. Like the article said, those college kids could have bought the one show they rewatched for the price of 6 months of Netflix, but those individuals probably weren't ever going to buy a dvd set anyway. Anime fosters a sense of wanting to collect and more directly support what we like. Just look at the olden days of when a show had one tv broadcast in Japan, and that was most likely the last time you'd ever see it without home video. American broadcast may have had rerurns, but those weren't forever, and would be the same few series repeating. Streaming offers a cheaper way to find something new and keep up with stuff as it comes out, but how many keep their Crunchyroll subscription to rewatch the same things over and over? I doubt physical sales eat into streaming subs as much as they think. People who buy a copy of that anime they really liked don't drop the service once they have it. They come back to find the next thing they will like. By refusing to offer physical versions, they are leaving money on the table because they aren't selling copies to customers who, most likely, were going to stay subscribed anyway. Overall, I will say this. Crunchyroll becoming the 800 lb. gorilla in the room has sucked as a customer. Subscription costs go up, what is available to purchase goes down, the other companies are scattered to the retailing winds, and the end result is that Crunchyroll actually gets less of my money because they do not provide what I, as a paying customer, want. |
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rizuchan
 Posts: 992 Location: Kansas |
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I’m… I shouldn’t say surprised these guys haven’t noticed, but those anime blu-rays sitting on Walmart’s shelves that supposedly show that physical media isn’t dead? Those are basically the *only* anime that Crunchy is releasing on Blu-ray. Ever since all this business with their warehouse, dropping low sellers from their store, and now layoffs have come up, they’ve announced like… 10 blu-ray releases this entire year? And a good half of those are rereleased consolidated seasons, likely intended for those Walmart shelves.
Yeah Discotek and AnimeEigo are doing amazing work for classic anime fans, but Crunchyroll licenses nearly 30 shows a season, and maybe one or two of those will get a physical release. Sentai thankfully still releases blu-rays of all their shows, but they get like, less than 10, even 5 shows a season? The article mentioned how having a store that sold physical anime kind of conflicts with being a streaming platform, and I suspect that is exactly what Crunchy is thinking right now too, and they are killing their physical release catalog. No one thinks it’s a big deal now, but when all those seasonal shows are up for renewal, you think they’re going to bother renewing the shows with the lowest streaming numbers? There’s going to be a time when a huge number of these “forgettable” seasonal shows start becoming completely unavailable. |
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Greed1914
Posts: 5345 |
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@rizuchan
Yep. That is where losing Right Stuf to the machine that is Sony/CR these days stings. It was where you could find that anime you liked, even if nobody else seemed to know about it. Walmart has been a selling spot for your perennial Shonen Jump titles for a long time, so anime's mere presence there isn't remarkable. Solo Leveling was the ultra-mega success of the year for them, so of course it gets that little extra push of bothering with a release. CR getting the vast majority of titles each season means that the majority of titles are at its mercy here. I appreciate Sentai for sticking with it, but they only have one or two things a season. Perusing upcoming preorders, there were quite a few from Sentai, but it was a lot of things like steelbook rereleases of older titles. I don't blame them for trying, but it's also clear they don't have much they can offer. Some of the newer titles for Discotek are license rescues, but it takes years for those licenses to expire. Funimation would release everything it licensed, even the duds, for home video, and some would get later rereleases on the cheap. I recall them saying they would sometimes make their own extras for home video when there wasn't anything else to include because the customers should get something extra for paying for it when they could stream it. None of those things happen now. As is the case with any monopoly, or at least de facto monopoly, the results are always worse for the customers. Other companies may be doing the best they can under the circumstances, but they've effectively been squeezed out of the market. If things continue this trend, and the recent layoffs and sale listing for the warehouse suggest that they will, I think the only realistic way for the home video market to keep going is if CR is ok with sub licensing titles for home video like Netflix has been. Even that won't be a fix, though, since we've seen that relatively few of Netflix's licenses got picked up for home video. The companies that exist that could do it probably don't have the resources to pick up a lot of those titles at any given time, and would be doing it with a knowledge gap when it comes to viewership numbers. And, that all assumes that CR isn't so dead set of strangling the home video market that it wouldn't prefer zero releases to being handed money by someone willing to take the risk. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2995 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Sentai actually has a ton of titles it could put out new releases for (or even simply re-release for the first time), as seen by a lot of titles that are exclusively streaming over on Hidive but either haven't been released in a long time or have never seen a physical release in English before, but they're either titles that (I guess) Sentai can't simply upscale for a traditional BD release or are short-form anime that likely just didn't get a lot of views, so they don't think it's worth the costs. Only recently did Sentai actually give SD-BD another chance with the recent Kino's Journey 2003 re-release, so one can only hope that Sentai may start doing more SD-BD releases in the future, if Kino performs well still. As for Discotek, I think "Mr. Discotek" more or less is done with simply licensing a vast amount of older anime simply for the hell of it, at this point, & instead is slowly focusing more on live-action movies, tokusatsu, & non-Japanese animation (not that I think it's a bad thing, necessarily, but it's definitely a noticeable shift in direction). Hell, even at a Discotek livestream about a year or so ago the dreaded "We've already licensed everything that's worth releasing" message was stated, despite there being tons of titles that have still never been licensed or could really use a new release, so while Discotek will still license the occasional "new" anime for their catalog I think it's fair to say that we can't really rely so strongly on them for fulfilling crazy licensing wish lists like we used to, sadly. Really, at this point, I think it's fair to say that the idea of the (physical) English anime industry being held up on the backs of people who first got into the medium back in the 90s & earlier is truly coming to an end, for the most part, and that for it to continue on in any fashion beyond a literal handful of companies continuing to hold things up new entities founded by those who entered the fandom in the 00s & later will really need to start coming to be. We've been seeing this very thing happening in manga with new publishers (Azuki/Omoi, Manga Mavericks Books, etc.), but anime hasn't had that true "next generation" of companies, at least for the physical side of things. |
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Turtleboy76
Posts: 213 |
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And yet this site stopped Shelf life. Easily the best thing they did.
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tuxedo-melvin
Posts: 45 |
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I've switched to all digital a long time ago due to convenience. It's a lot easier to just watch and play all my stuff on PC which I'm usually glued to.
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FireChick
 Subscriber Posts: 2760 Location: United States |
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I'm pretty sure this isn't referring to anime in general, just Lupin stuff. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2995 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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No, it was a general response stated at the very end of a livestream when it came to people asking for other titles, after all of the announcements were made, & not just in relation to Lupin (which they've released [first-time] pretty much everything they could by mid-2024, outside of literally one or two short productions, like Lupin Shansei, & some older stuff which they have been getting back to). Again, I'm not complaining about Discotek's shift towards putting out more live-action & western animation, but they definitely have slowed down a lot when it comes to anime, which matches with the "we've tackled the stuff worth releasing" message they gave before. If Mr. Discotek still felt that there was tons of anime worth releasing that he had the ability to license then we'd be getting way more of those, and fewer re-releases than what Discotek has tended to announce more of than in the past (though at least their re-releases have more reason behind them than how Sentai usually handles them). |
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KaidoYuji8Shinji
Posts: 149 Location: Manchester, NH |
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It’s really sad seeing the Enshitification of Crunchyroll. Legit ruined Funimation amd RightStuf. Now we have very little physical media releases. Funi, as much as they got hate in the past, released everything (sometimes over and over). Wish the mergers never happened.
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Covnam
 Posts: 4372 |
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Didn't know about that voltron release, too bad it's DVD though. Hopefully it does well enough for a BD release
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catandmouse
Posts: 255 |
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Physical media all the way.
I first learned about The King’s Avatar from a feature written here back in 2017 and I went over to WebNovel and started reading the nivel as it was being published. The last chapter was released in early 2020 I think. The comic is officially being released in English as well and sometime along the way, I think it was the Chinese company decided to change the English translation of some names. The new names might be more accurate or whatever, but for years fans have known these characters by some other name and the changes were jarring. Anyway, I had purchased every single one of the 1728 chapters and I logged back in to discover to my horror that WebNovel had edited the chapters to change the names and any times the changes are shoddy so for example the character is speaking, but they use their in-game character name instead of the character’s actual name. In short, I hate these changes, and if I had owned this series in a physical book I wouldn’t have to worry about arbitrary changes later on. I already paid for it, leave my stuff alone. I’ve been buying the Taiwanese physical releases of some Korean webcomics I follow that have an official (digital-only) English release, because I want something more permanent. I can’t read Chinese, and some companies are doing physical releases, but none for any stories I’m following. Anyway, I’m glad physical media is making a comeback. |
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varmintx
 Posts: 1320 Location: Covington, KY |
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I have a thousand blu-rays, but that number hasn't changed much since the pandemic. Can't afford to buy them anymore. Willing to splurge when something special gets released...like, I don't know, a UHD of Angel's Egg. *still waiting*
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Triltaison
 Posts: 937 |
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I'm definitely in the camp that farmer CR bought the Funi and RS horses purely to bring them behind the barn and shoot them.
Funi titles released circa 2020 are astronomically expensive now, as are many classics like Serial Experiments Lain. Many of the Nozomi releases are getting up there, too. Popular, enduring titles with existing assets could just be reprinted with a logo change, but they're being left to rot. CR is barely putting out any discs at all anymore. When Odd Taxi randomly got a physical release at the end of last year, I about did a spit take I was so shocked. I've been collecting since the VHS days and have over 2300 anime DVD and BD SKUs in my hoard. It's fair to say that I like physical releases. But I've barely been given anything new to purchase from CR in about a year, and each month's slate is looking thinner and sadder. Thank God for AnimeEigo. |
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