This does tend to happen with changing markets. As a market rapidly expands, studios crumble away and new ones swoop in to replace them.
Anime boomed in the 90s, and then it lulled for a while. When the Covid-19 Pandemic shut down the world, anime interest spiked, but due to literal health reasons studios had to delay or cancel content. This has negative effects for years later, with some studios never being able to recover. Some lost very important people, and that can lower the quality of the studio’s works, which can lead to complaints, less viewership, lower employee morale, and ultimately studio closure.
As an interesting note: Cost of Living in most of Japan isn’t all that bad, actually. According to (source), the United States is ranked 9 and Japan is 76. The cost of living in Japan is about half the cost of living in the USA, meaning the minimum amount of pay a person should expect to live is less in Japan. Now, this is of course an average. So someplace like Tokyo is going to be more expensive than Fukuoka, just as literally any city in California will be highway robbery compared to any city in a state like Oklahoma. But for the purposes of this conversation, the low pay isn’t really the big problem. Japanese culture makes up the difference for low pay and generally Japanese workers will stay with low paying jobs, as much as I might wish that aspect of their culture was different.
The biggest problem is the physical health toll due to overly long work hours, leading to sleeping under their desks in their office most days of a month to be considered normal and expected.
Maybe if they stopped churning out the same tired highschool drivel year after year they wouldn’t be sinking into obscurity.
I don’t think that’s the issue. The anime industry makes tons of money. The issue is that that most of that money doesn’t go to the studios doing the animation.
They are doing to animation studios what the US did to VFX houses.
Most animation studios do contract work; they get hired by a production company to do a job, and get paid for it irrespective of whether the product does well on the market. The problems here are more structural, which are actually explained in the article.
Is it just me or are these studios failing a cash-thrown-at-them situation? I know I get my anime from dodgy websites, but if there was a Netflix (2017 version of Netflix that is) for “all” anime, I’d pony up and so would my pony and most of his friends…
Studios don’t have that power, they don’t usually own the distribution rights of the shows they animated.
Yeah, they could all just team up and host their own distrbution site but would rather all go down one by one since “my company should be the best anime company and have ALL the contracts” is the ceo’s only care.
Honestly I just want them to not use trash subs or even worse, machine translated subs. There’s no reason why fans doing translation for free can get far better results than a company with an actual budget. Until then, I’m choosing to support the studios by buying the blurays when they come out instead.
Anyone demanding that one platform carry all tv and movie content, even if just one genre, is not understanding the industry.
It’s not like music, and it’s historically not like music either. You never had one channel with all content. You never had one home video company with all content. And cable is not like a streaming service, it’s like the internet. Streaming services are more akin to channels.
Also, doesn’t crunchy roll have a very large percentage of anime? At least relative to something like Netflix having all Sitcoms? Or Hulu having every single show cop show?
It’s just unreasonable to expect a single platform to have “all” of something. Even if you don’t truly mean all, and you just mean 80%.
Also, we don’t want that sort of market consolidation. Just look at Disney.
If you go to the official Japanese website of a show and look up where you can watch it, almost every time you’re presented with a list of close to two dozen streaming services. The exception is when one particular service (always an American one like Netflix or Amazon Prime) has exclusivity rights to it, but they’re the minority.
Exclusivity deals aside, this seems to me like a much better setup, at least from a consumer perspective. Shows are for the most part not dotted across different services, but there’s no market consolidation. And even if something isn’t on the service you’re subscribed to, it will probably be available on a service where you can just rent an individual show or episode instead of having yet another subscription. And I imagine that if they’re not competing on hostage-taking, that would mean they’re competing more on price and quality of service instead.
That seems like a better culture and way of doing things.
I just don’t think it’s possible to have that in the US market, or others.
I would love for streaming platforms to compete on features. I use to have HBO via Apple TV Channels before HBO bailed on the deal. And I enjoyed it because Apple dos complete on quality and ease of use, at least when it comes to this specific situation. It was better than the official HBO app(s).
