Category Archives: Fun With Numbers

Fun With Numbers: Visual Novels, Pseudonyms, and the Mainstream

Posted on by
Reply

Among other things, this Fall season features a pair of intriguing visual novel adaptations, Grisaia no Kajitsu and Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai. The two are somewhat dissimilar titles, but have quite a bit in common on paper; both series are quite popular (the franchises took the #4 and #1 spots in they getchu 2013 rankings, respectively), and have already won their share of hardware (Grisaia at the 2011 moe game awards, Daitoshokan in the 2013 getchu user awards). Perhaps even more interestingly, both series ostensibly swapped their original PC voice casts for new ones in advance of the anime. I say ostensibly because they didn’t actually swap their casts out at all; the same people who have been doing the voices for the franchise from the beginning will be doing the voices for the anime adaptations. This is also the case for the third non-Fate VN adaptation of the season, Ushinawareta Mirai wo Motomete. In practice, the reasons for these name swaps are fairly straightforward – voice actresses tend to avoid using their real names when voicing works that contain adult content.

Looking into recent history, I found a number of such cases where the original VN cast dropped pseudonyms to work on the anime version, with such titles making up a plurality of non-sequel VN adaptations over the BD era. That same history suggests that some combination of factors contributes to higher odds against them making it big as anime.

Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: October 2014 US Amazon Data (Initial Numbers)

Posted on by
3

October figures to be an interesting month, the second in a row headlined by multiple releases likely to chart. The most obvious is DBZ: Battle of Gods, which has the combo pack at 138th place a week before release. GitS: Arise and Hellsing Ultimate also have respectable probabilities of ranking given good thresholds; Ultimate is basically in the same position Steins Gate was in a month ago, and that release encouragingly broke into the lower 200s today.

Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: Appleseed Alpha Sold 11,093 R1 BDs in Week 1

Posted on by
1

As you may be aware, I track US anime releases on amazon, ostensibly to get a rough idea of how much particular lower-end titles might be selling. However, the titles I track each month come from amazon’s anime tag, which is not always applied to all anime-related releases. That’s what happened with the US release of prequel movie Appleseed Alpha on July 22 of this year. This is an issue because the BDs of this movie sold over 11k units in their first week on sale, via TheNumbers. It’s a lost opportunity because I could have used it to test predictions, but the datapoint itself is still somewhat interesting in its own right.

AA’s total is only 655 fewer copies than that of Attack on Titan’s first set, and that’s without accounting for the fact that the movie’s release was split between BD and DVD versions (as opposed to AoT, where the release was a BD/DVD combo pack counted as BD sales). Attack on Titan may well have the longer sales tail, though; it’s currently ranked at 1,022 while Appleseed Alpha fell back to 6,819 in Movies and TV. It’s worth noting the potential contrast between the two fanbases, one older (and presumably salaried) versus another younger and more casual.

(A screencap of relevant week’s BD sales chart is included after the break.)

Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: The Big Range of Big Underestimates in Oricon Weekly Manga Totals

Posted on by
2

One thing I can’t say enough is that data should be interpreted with a healthy amount of caution and second-guessing. This is especially true for manga charts, when a combination of ridiculously high weekly thresholds and the desire to have fast data on the effects of currently-airing anime can lead to some very incomplete and erroneous interpretations of the facts.

I’ve already done a few case studies on how Oricon and publisher claims can differ for series where the publisher boasted of some particular print total (usually in an insert on a volume of the series or a magazine). Those cases are enlightening, but not necessarily general, since there’s a heavy element of volunteer bias involved in which series get their totals reported. Recently, though, I found a fairly large list of distributor claims of print volume totals (via Shuppan Shiyou, see post #99 here), which contains latest-volume printing data for over 100 series published in 2013. It still isn’t totally general, but is at least a tad more representative of manga at large. In order to get a better idea of how much Oricon underestimates the “average” series, I took the weekly-charts total for a volume and compared it with the given print total for the same volume. The results of this comparison (which can be found here) highlight some large and inconsistent discrepancies between the Oricon figures and the official publisher totals.

Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: Incomplete Collection

Posted on by
Reply

I spent this morning putting together US amazon release data for September. It’s shaping up to be an interesting months in a while – at the least, series that haven’t provided any DVD/BD chart datapoints yet are in the mid-to-low 4 digits, suggesting some of them could possibly chart, yielding more data that would make estimating sales via amazon more feasible. That’s a lot of fun, and I wish I could be more excited about that, but getting together the data reminded me of something I’d much rather forget; Sentai Filmworks’ Gatchaman Crowds release. It’s labeled on amazon as the ‘Complete’ Collection, which is a label it takes tremendous balls to stick with when your release knowingly excludes the actual last episode of the series. The official reason why the Sentai version of Crowds will be excluding the episode is that it is owned by some entity separate from the original licensee, was given in a answer which was (probably intentionally) vague about exactly what happened in regards to the episode. What is not vague at all is the fact that the R1 release of this series will be lacking critical content as the home video equivalent of a 500-page novel with the last 20 pages ripped out.

Personally, I’m perfectly okay with companies that play to win. Anime is a niche market, and people at every level have to make hard choices in dealing with the business side of the industry. I’d rather an industry stay sustainable and churn out products I really like than break the bank over artistic integrity and end up unable to churn out any kind of work in the future. That statement represents a significant oversimplification – entertainment being a business doesn’t force a binary choice between sales and artistic integrity – but my point here is that choices made with finance in mind aren’t necessarily evil ones. There is a wrinkle to this particular story, though, that rubs me the wrong way.

Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: September 2014 US Amazon Data (Initial Numbers)

Posted on by
1

August was a boring month as far as high-powered releases go. September is not, and there are a couple of series (particularly the Steins Gate combo pack hovering around 1500 with 4 weeks to go and the second half of Attack on Titan) which figure to have a pretty decent chance of making the US BD charts and providing really useful data. 4 solid datapoints wouldn’t be much, but it’s a lot better than 2. I could get more pumped about that if one of the release titles due out this month weren’t straight-up false advertising.

Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: Attack on Titan’s US Release Sold 11,748 Copies on Week 1

Posted on by
11

OpusData BD data for the week ending in June 8th is now publicly avaialble, and since the BD/DVD combo packs are counted as BD releases (as they were for the Fairy Tail movie), that means we have sales figures for Attack on Titan’s part 1 release. The release, which performed the best on amazon out of any US release I’ve tracked in the past 6 months. Assuming the BD/DVD combo packs were counted the same way this company has previously done, Attack on Titan was the 14th best release among US BD content on this week, selling 11,748 copies.

AoT_wk1_us

This actually represents a severe underestimation for my rough-fit model, which pegged it at around 30,000 copies. While it underestimated DBZ season 3’s first week by 20%, this represents an overestimate of more than 60%. It’s possible that the series’ airing on network TV during solicitation made it more of an amazon-heavy title. Most likely, though, this underscores the fact that the model is still rough and prone to error. I’ll be tweaking the model a bit in the next couple of days to see if I can get a model that less severely overestimates this series while still covering the other two points of confirmed data (DBZ s3 and Aria the Natural). I should have at least one more chance to test that model when the series’ second part comes out in late September.

Fun With Numbers: A Good Summer for Hot Cocoa

Posted on by
6

This past week was a pretty unambiguously good one for Square Enix’s publishing division, featuring sales of over 95,000 for previously-unranked Isshukan Friends, a boost for the old volumes of Gekkan Shojo Nozaki-kun, and the final volume of Cocoa Fujiwara’s Inu x Boku SS topping the list with over 250,000 copies sold. That last part might not even be the most impressive thing Fujiwara did this week, either. While the 250,000 in IxB sales is, in large part, in keeping with previous volumes of the series, Fujiwara also saw her brand new manga, Katsute Mahou Shoujo to Aku wa Tekitai shite Ita, notch first week sales of over 80,000. While not unprecedented by any means, that level of early sales puts her on a pretty exclusive list.

Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: Dragonball, Naruto, Love Live, and the Importance of Second-Tier Hits

Posted on by
2

Weekly Shonen Jump is Japan’s most successful manga magazine, something that’s been true, excluding a brief early-aughts blip, for upwards of 20 years. But the brand didn’t get there by some fluke – it earned notability by harnessing a number of talented artists in many eras; Go Nagai in the late 60s, Buichi Terasawa and Osamu Akimoto in the 70s, Hirohiko Araki, Masami Kurumada, and countless others in the 80s.

But that doesn’t mean the past 2 decades were free of uncertainty or bad luck for Shueisha. In actuality, in between the early-nineties peak where the magazine’s circulation topped 6 million copies and the modern era of Oda Eiichiro breaking his own volumes’ records on a regular basis, they experienced one of the biggest misfortunes that can befall a publishing empire: two franchise cornerstone series ending withing 13 months of each other.

Continue reading →

Fun With Numbers: August 2014 US Amazon Data (Initial Numbers)

Posted on by
1

July’s almost over, and while I’m not totally done tracking releases for that month, I think it’s reasonably safe to say none of them are likely to snag an elusive top 20 BD/top 30 DVD slot – Naruto and Hetalia were the only series to spend multiple days in triple digits and neither cracked the top 500.

This August looks pretty thin in terms of series likely to chart: the only releases currently better than 20,000th are DBZ’s sixth BD set, Love Lab, and Shinsekai Yori’s second half. Tracking them, as always, to add to the dataset and hopefully eventually enable analysis of the US market.

Continue reading →