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.
One of the many controversial features of sites like myanimelist and aniDB that allow users to list their anime is their inclusion of toplists. What’s the proper way to weight scores? Should sequels (which have an intrinsic advantage in 10-point averages) be counted normally? Is there a point to having one at all when it invites as much vitriol as it sometimes does?
Though actual discussions over topics like these tend to descend into unglorified hoopla fairly quickly, these toplists and rankings can be very interesting subjects for study. Especially if you dig a layer below the top and start to look at what they really measure.
