Let's stop supporting <illegal streaming site> and others like it

[MasterDias]

[quote="Midori (post: 1454047)"]It may be more expensive, but all of your money (I believe]
That might be an over-simplification actually. Far more than just the animation studio is involved on an anime production committee, and I'm sure each of those companies wants their own slice of the pie. I have absolutely no clue as to what percentage of profits actually reach the studio, but given the dismal work conditions Japanese animators are apparently in, I suspect they aren't number one on the list.
I know very little about this though, so I could be mistaken.

Buying the anime directly is all fine and good, but people (as in Western fans) generally aren't going to want to pay something like $80 for 2 or 3 episode discs each even with fancy packaging and extras. You really need to have a collector's mentality for that sort of thing.

[Nate]

MasterDias is right, Japanese DVDs are insanely expensive. This is probably why lately a lot of companies have been showing censored versions of the shows on TV, and release an uncensored DVD in hopes of enticing people to buy them.

[blkmage]

Here's an interesting article that popped up recently.

tl;dr:
The lion's share of profits are split between members of the production committee. Unfortunately, a lot of the time, studios themselves are not on production committees, and thus actually receive very little. Gonzo is brought up as a studio who tried to get away from the production committee model of funding, but ultimately failed because they couldn't make anything people wanted to buy. Finally, like Nate said, anime goods reap far bigger revenues than DVDs, hence, one of the reasons why BRS was bundled with Nendoroids and Figmas.

Here is an equally helpful article about how anime is made. It's easy to forget, but anime is principally a financial venture, not an artistic one, created as a way to sell DVDs and anime goods.



A huge problem with the US model in particular is that it assumes that people are willing to buy things that they haven't seen yet, which is not at all how TV anywhere works. I don't go and buy all of Lost without having watched it on TV first. Now, obviously, things are getting better, but not entirely. The argument that there's so much anime being offered legally doesn't really make sense to me, because it equivocates the fact that it's okay that we can't watch Fractale because we can watch Freezing now.

Finally, I just dropped $400 on the Rakkyo BD set. I'll come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who tries to sass me about watching fansubs of those movies two years ago.

[Midori]

Woah, okay, um, wow. I think my brain just broke. Oh, but thank you for correcting me.