Anime Industry Discussion Thread #1

Since the other thread started badly, lets try here instead.

I think the idea some people in this thread are trying to get across is that anime is not quite the capitalist venture some of the young fans think it is (I'm not trying to make this a Young/Old divide, but it's just fact that the younger fans are born into a different idea of how they think the anime industry works)

Yes there has always been a moneymaking element in certain areas of anime (Gundam, Kids shows etc.) and nowadays money seems to come before everything else, but there was a time when none of that mattered. There was a time when "SALES" were just a means of measuring how popular a series might be.

It's not like a table of businessmen one day thought up the idea of 'anime' and suddenly it was created and everything was about LD/VHS/DVD/BD sales and marketable characters and concepts and how much they could earn from character goods. If anything, that's a very recent development as far as late night anime goes.

Many studios were started out of bedrooms with the 'employees' (What was realistically just Japanese kids with an interest in animation) not earning a salary and trying to juggle school/work around their hobby.

Even the biggest record labels today were bedroom operations - and this was before the days of the internet. The same applies to videogames too.

There might be lots of money and business interest in late night anime now, but this isn't how it always was and when the interest inevitably runs out (which it will) and companies like Sony realize there's no worthwhile money to be made (which there won't be), they will drop out and many of these studios will go back essentially to being much smaller.