[Rebel]

@ Rebel: I still don't see your point... how does FMA's popularity detract from the quality of FUNimation's version? You were talking about quality, not "it's cooler cause less people like it"... at least that's what I gathered... but I guess if we see it from your point of view, BGC2040 is the best anime made in Japan since most Japanese didn't like it and Last Exile is the greatest anime ever made because not that many people paid attention to it. Fuck yeah!

what? no. I said that many of the shows Fun acquires have assured its success comapred to other companies because they are popular from the get-go. To enjoy many anime series you have to really get into it and take the time to appreciate it.

Think of it like alchohol, Genon and ADV control the micro-breweries and a few well known brands, they're popular among their crowd, but that's it. Fun is like Budweiser, at one point or another, EVERYONE drinks it, not everyone likes it, but Fun, like Bud, still makes their money, thus making them more money on quantity over quality.

I'm not saying it's cooler 'cause less people like it, I'm saying there's a lot of good stuff out there that just isn't as popular and thus doesn't make the market because it doesn't have the same kind of support base. The 100 fans who totally love *small series* are not enough to make releasing it profitable. The 10 million fans who love *big series* make it very profitable, though the end result is a limited market filled with lots of popular series, and very little for the rest of the fans.

Upside? This is great short-term marketing, as the fans of these series will gobble them up for a short period of time, downside: as fans grow up and grow out of these shows, they will find the anime market does not sell what they wish to buy. ie: more mature programming(not to be confused with more violent programming), thicker plots, deeper characters, ect...

And the problem is this: fans grow out of *show* and look for *new show*, *new show* is neither aired nor for sale, while re-runs of *old show* keep up, without a source to buy from or a channel to watch on, fans turn to illegal downloads.

Which is what my whole argument stemmed from, the losses are NOT due to illegal downloading, as most fans who download shows want Japanese-English subbed, not DVD rips, and most fans who enjoy the things they download, go out and buy them(if they're on the market). Cause here's the thing, they're saying the losses are due to lack of DVD sales. Well, you have to RELEASE the DVD before it can be bootlegged, and somebody had to buy that to get it on the net.

So any series that has DVD rips and is being bootlegged has already been deemed marketable enough to put out for sale. If companies are counting on fans of another series to randomly pick up DVDs with no knowledge of what's on them, then as a corporation, their marketing strategies really suck.

...and that was longer than I expected.