The August slate of releases has over 40 titles already. In particular, I’m intrigued by how Sailor Moon Crystal will perform. Also quietly rooting for a few other titles currently on the margin.
Earlier this month, we found out that Steins;Gate had sold over 100,000 units in the US, raking in a little than 4 million gross as a BD collection. This was an intriguing datapoint and posed two questions.
One, how typical is this result? Is it a generational occurrence? Annual? Monthly? Weekly?
Two, how is the US market for anime on disc doing as a whole?
Well, I have an abundance of amazon rank data for 218 unique US anime releases tracked over a 6-month period from January through June, 2016. Let’s dig into that a little.
Disclaimer: In this post I’m going to do some funky stuff with data that research has led me to believe I can reasonably do, but I don’t have any inside information and I could make mistakes here in a number of ways.
There is a desperately-needs-to-be-written followup to the Steins;Gate post from this Tuesday. But first I need to talk about Section 23, what their releases are doing on amazon right now, and why that’s curious.
Surprise! Apparently a 5-year-old anime can still pull in some numbers when it tries. US BD sales numbers just came out for late April 2016 and contained the surprising revelation that the complete version of Steins;Gate, released on September 30th, 2014 had sold over 100,000 copies in the US over the past 82 weeks.
Some people may have questions about this, so I’ll try to outline the situation and why it’s somewhat interesting.
Wow, it totally is July. I still take data, and am making the price-tracking from last month a constant thing, since it works consistently and takes no extra effort or bandwidth to run.
Nothing exceptional to report this month, though the ~40%-cut prices of Sentai titles are still pretty visible. Those seem to have lasted consistently throughout the month of June, so I’m going to do a little reading up and talk about what selling at a constant 40% of an already-down list price might mean for the company.
The first week of this particular June is packed by releases, headlined by a pair of Hosoda films and the Berserk movies. Rest is pretty barren, though.
There’s a chance I’ll regret this later, but for this month, I’ll be tracking prices of each item to see if they stay steady or shift significantly after the items listed go on sale. Depending on the results, I may have a slightly bold prediction to make after running those numbers at the end of next month. there may be something about the significance of preorders, the fate of a particular company, or nothing much at all. It really depends.
So, um, it’s almost well into May and I’ve been molasses with updates, being busy in a good way in life and other hobbies. I kept up the tracking and the data doesn’t change, so I was never particularly motivated to sit down and finish this up. Even though it contains 4 weeks of a new volume (Eva 3.33) selling fairly well, and all. It’s here now, though.
One thing I should mention above the cut: this will be the last of this particular genre of posts. I commited myself when I started that I would keep doing this so long as it didn’t personally cost me any money, and nash info made some changes to the opusdata free trial setup that will make it difficult to keep getting one each week, so actually getting the data each week via a paid account would cost upwards of $200/yr. Not really an amount I’m personally willing to pay for access to an obviously incomplete database (it’d be a different calculus if they actually tracked anime TV shows and less-popular movies, and didn’t outright make mistakes on occasion).
Case in point, the BD data for the last week (the one ending on March 6) outright did not update, staying displayed as the values for the previous week. I’d deal with that sort of human-error hassle for free, but I wouldn’t pay money to handle it.
Here are the anime releases I’ll be tracking for the month of May. A surprisingly large number of releases started out 50% off (prices starred below), most of them Section 23 titles.
It’s been a hectic month. I’ve been taking data regularly as always, but posts are going to be slower. Here’s the upcoming US BD/DVD slate for April.
The last two weeks of January show some continuing lower-than-expected sales figures, as a likely effect of holiday fatigue.
