Short article on the end of Geneon entertainment’s participation in the US market back in 2007.
Via Anime Insider: Geneon Ceasing US Sales (December 2007)
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Author Archives: torisunanohokori
Via Anime Insider: Manga Musicals (December 2007)
A short article on manga-based musical productions.
Via Anime Insider: Imaginasian Channel (December 2007)
A short article on the Imaginasian channel, an obscure startup channel that ran some anime in the US.
Fun With Numbers: The Wind Rises Week 1 Sales (Plus Princess Mononoke BDs)
Small update for 2 relevant releases, which naturally went untracked and thus can’t be fitted to my amazon formula. The first week of sales data for the US release of The Wind Rises is out, clocking in at 53,698 units (40,818 BD/12,880 DVD). A BD release of Princess Mononoke also sold 29,913 BDs (also moving 30,169-29,913=256 DVDs) in the same week.
For some points of comparison, Laputa’s BD rerelease sold 12,611 week 1 copies, From Up on Poppy Hill sold 33,102 week 1 copies, Arietty sold 264,252 week 1 copies, and Howl’s Moving Castle sold 193,006 week 1 copies.
Game Like a Statistician: The Sometimes-Filthy Opportunity Cost of Zing
Dragon Quest is a interesting franchise of games for a number of reasons: it’s got a very nationalized fandom (large in Japan, tiny worldwide), the cutest mascot, and it’s really damn good.* Of particular interest here is that the Dragon Quest franchise has, from very early on, incorporated a good deal of random chance. Owing to the creator’s personal interest in gambling, opportunities to press one’s luck are found throughout the franchise, both overtly advertised in casinos and more subtly worked in the battle system. Unlike in real life, the casinos in Dragon Quest are eminently beatable – save at church, play highest-stakes game available, reloading if necessary, until a win happens, and repeat until you have the Metal King Sword at level 8. The finer points of DQ’s battle system are less obviously solvable – information beyond one’s control can determine whether a risk one is about to take is smart or stupid, and a lot of fictional parties ended up dead thanks to their players inadequate assessment of said risks.
One of the most fun choices in the series originates from a spell introduced in the series’ third installment. Zing is a spell which, half of the time it is cast, does nothing, an annoying feature balanced out by what it does the other half of the time – resurrect an unconscious party member. Thus, for much of the game, a player with a KO’ed ally faces a nonsimple dilemma – is zing generally worth it? Does the upside of having that ally back outweigh the opportunity cost? I’m going to examine some of the fundamentals of that question using a fairly basic battle simulator I built from scratch.
Active Engagement Through Timed Comments: Arpeggio of Blue Steel
Arpeggio of Blue Steel was a very nice anime, a naval-themed series with throwbacks to space-based anime of the 1980s, a light-hearted gear that popped up at all the right times, and loads of ambitious 3DCG animation. And it didn’t go unnoticed in Japan – the series itself was a huge success which moved disks and manga volumes alike. Too, just about an hour after this post is scheduled to go up the 19th annual Animation Kobe Award ceremony will be held, honoring, among others, Arpeggio of Blue Steel’s Director.
All of the above are macro indicators of how Arpeggio went over with audiences, but not so much on micro level ones. It’s kind of natural to wonder which parts of the series were the ones that won the largest fractions of the audience over – was it the bear-suit gags, the tense battle scenes, the quotable quotes, or the plentiful new-school takes on the Itano circus? Those questions are exactly the sort of thing a time-sensitive method of anime analysis is built to shed light on, which is why we’re about to take a moderately deep dive into Arpeggio’s scrolling comment history.
For more information on this analysis method, see this similar post on Ping Pong The Animation, or this introductory post covering particular episodes of Shingeki no Bahamut and Carnival Phantasm.
Fun With Numbers: Precedent for Long Tails in US Anime Sales Totals
Though there are plenty of sources out there from which one can learn about it, the inner workings of the US anime market are often characterized by what we don’t know. I track US anime releases on amazon because I’m curious about said market. That curiosity has several points of origin, but I chasing after one primary question; do fans buy the titles one would think they buy, to the extent one would think, from their presence on social media?
But tracking US amazon rankings is only useful insofar as these rankings have the potential to correspond to real sales data. And even that’s not particularly useful if the “real” data has the potential to be off by a factor of 100 due to unpredictable factors. One obvious potential contributor to the potential for underestimations are long tails, the combined contribution of totals from all weeks the release doesn’t make the threshold on a given set of charts. These are a very familiar foe when it comes to trying to compare sales figures, and are definitely worth addressing. There’s plenty of reason to believe long tails might be a factor in the US home video market – per-episode prices are much lower than they are in Japan, and thresholds are much higher.
I previously used a trial account to access the lifetime home-video sales totals of various anime movies in Nash Information Services’ OpusData database. Recently, I found out that the companion website to the service TheNumbers, stores years worth of back-data on its weekly charts, though its thresholds are, by design, severely limited compared to those measured on OpusData. Using those charts, it was a trivial task to go back to each movie’s release date and check how much of its lifetime total was accumulated while it was on the BD20/DVD30 toplists. Note that 2 of the 12 movies in the original sample never made said toplists and thus cannot be compared. Results are shown after the break.
Fun With Numbers: Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods Sold 17,247 Copies in Week 4
This is the fourth week of Battle of Gods’ ranking, and the first week it fell off the combined DVD/BD charts. It still adds ~17,000 BD copies to the running total (DVDs could have accounted for at most ~6000 additional copies this week), which is now 162,228 total copies. That’s about half of Wrath of the Dragon’s lifetime total (332,730 copies), and it could get closer to that figure as time goes by. Sales drop off by a bit every week, so I doubt we’ll see exactly how close it ends up getting.
Also noteworthy is the fact that Hellsing Ultimate did not chart in the same week. This week, ending in November 2nd, contained its release date, and it fell short of the 15,544 copy BD threshold. Possibly well short – my model predicted a much lower figure:
https://twitter.com/Torisunahokori/status/537018991953600514
Anyway, here’s the chart* if you care to look: Source Link
*I realized just recently where TheNumbers’ chart archives are stored, so there’s no reason to screencap stuff anymore.
Fun With Numbers: December 2014 Amazon Data (Initial Numbers)
First-look Amazon anime release data for the month of December. Bold prediction: the Cowboy Bebop box does well enough to chart in a normal week, but doesn’t break the charts because of how ridiculously high thresholds get after Black Friday. All data first taken on November 24.
Via Newtype USA: Yasunori Ide and Yosuke Kuroda (January 2003)
Director Yasunori Ide and writer Yosuke Kuroda talk about their work on Mizuho’s character in Please Teacher, revealing they drew heavily from Mitsuru Adachi’s manga for inspiration.
Animetics 