August News Thread, Bet it feels like August at Otakon

Crunchyroll will be streaming the first Moyashimon series.

Also, Angel Beats and the second season of Hell Girl.

Durarara!! blu-ray lunchbox is $150 on pre-order.

PSN update coming tomorrow with the promised Crunchyroll app.

And I guess everyone knows about Haganai season two by now.

oddly, found out about it...

on TVTropes.

I had to check sources to believe it.

I guess this was inevitable. English-only BD for Persona 4. Remind me again why Sony thought it was a good idea to put Japan and North America in the same region code?

It shouldn't have been inevitable. Plenty of Blu-ray releases have come out with both vocal tracks in the US. Japan is going crazy with the reverse importation stuff and alienating their fans on this side of the Pacific in doing so.

P4A went from the surest of sure purchases to me being iffy about buying it at all. It's not Sentai's fault, but I don't want a DVD release and I don't want it to be without the Japanese audio track. But at least I'm getting an HD option, which is more than Funimation can say for Kadokawa stuff as of late.

Sigh.

what screwed them over was that if it was dvd-only, they would've gotten less flak.

meanwhile, clemens give a very good talk at an austrian con. more about history of anime
http://youtu.be/BevPFBmOdig

Possibly, but I already know that the lack of an HD option kept me away from at least one Funi release I wold have bought on Blu-ray. It's an upgrade over that shitty optin, but it's just slightly less shitty. At least they're adjusting the price downward to compensate, I suppose.

Sentai releases plenty of dvd-only titles that has Jp bd, nobody bats an eye. the loss of sales is nothing they can do about, but this would not be any kind of controversy if not for the last-minute change.

meanwhile, kotori sound theme is super-effective
http://yaraon.blog109.fc2.com/blog-entry-11030.html

Different shows get different expectations. No one gives a shit that Mayo Chiki is DVD sub-only because not a lot of people care about it at all.

Those Sentai DVD-only releases are sub-only niche titles even by US anime market standards. Anything "major," which P4A qualifies as, gets a BD release nowadays. The hardcore fans who care about those releases don't care about the lack of a dub, but I have seen grumblings about shows like Hidamari not getting HD even if the dub is a nonissue.

The Sentai formula seems to be that if they gve it a dub, it'll see Blu-ray. And I suspect that if no HD release was offered at all, people would have griped more given the expectation that P4A qualified for a full release. More choice rarely results in making people mad; it's when you take something expected away that you draw ire.

i don't know, according to what you're saying if they also skip dubbing p4 anime it would help relieve demand lol. i'm sure the dub-only people are basically marginalized at this point. and yea i agree sentai is banking on the title being big enough. there are a lot of things they could do if they didn't commit to the blu-ray so early and then have the rug pulled from under them. but oh well.

That's a big hypothetical, though. It's basically saying Sentai should have broken tradition (for them) and obscured what kind of release they intended for P4A and not treated it as their biggest license in years, when it absolutely is in terms of mass marketability.

Yes they got bit in the ass on this one, but they probably bought home release rights when they got the simulcast, since they announced both simultaneously. So they knew they were releasing on Blu-ray from the outset, making it a premium release from their perspective.

I see no real flaw in how Sentai handled things. They expected rationality from their business partner, were given every expectation that they would get it, and got screwed over by hypersensitive businesspeople in Japan.

It is a crappy situation, but the blame principally lies with Japan. I suspect a lot of Persona fans, who came to the series via the games, will be okay with having the game's English vocal cast as the only choice when it comes to the HD release. I'm in the minority by caring about the Japanese vocal track on this one.

This post has been edited by VRMaster on Aug 1 2012, 06:28 AM

No, they could just say the BD is coming later. It's breaking tradition only in terms of BD-DVD day-date thing, which doesn't really matter in terms of sales.

I think "broken tradition" is a retarded thing when the alternative is to release a product with no Japanese dub, or alternatively release a product missing a critical part of the show after first announcing it one way. actually "broken tradition" is a retarded thing to say in general.

without knowing all the details i wouldn't make any of those statements. yeah, i'm sure japan requested to not have the dub, but there are a lot of things that could be done instead of just removing the japanese track. i already listed a couple of them to start.

It is incredibly unlikely that we'll ever get a full story. But with what we know, it's very reasonable to assume that, as you said, Sentai had the rug pulled out from under them. I find it hard to fault them for thinking they would be able to provide the bill of goods they had said they were going to offer. It's hard to run a business if you're assuming your partners are going to screw you over. So I can't fault them for playing this release like they've done all their others: when announcing a license, tell the customers what the release will be up front.

Maybe that will change now, but even if it had, this was well past the announcement and past the actual solicitation where they had to say what they're selling.

And it's perfectly okay to stop right there.

I'm sure they got a cut on something as a result of this.

the main thing is, I'm sure a lot more people would not care if, say, they did what NISA did with kantagatari. Or if they could pull it off by delaying it. Or just raise the price on the set. there's a ton of things you can do short of removing the japanese track. to me it sounds like more of a planning issue given how it is happening, that contributed to the mess. i'm going to not cut anyone any slack over this, seems like the logical thing to do

because, after all, who would buy this blu-ray set? It is clearly not a deal.

Someone who doesn't care about the Japanese dub. A lot of people know those characters as the English voiced versions, full stop.

It isn't incredibly clear what the publisher demanded beyond taking out the Japanese dub in the HD release. I suspect Sentai did their own calculations and wants the discs out when P4 furvor is at peak when P4U and P4G release this year. So they were willing to put out a dub only track in HD to hopefully grab people who weren't going to listen to the Japanese dub anyway. Those people do still exist when you're talking about specifically this property. We may see an HD subbed release in the future, at which point I'd be much more open to a purchase. If Sentai has shown anything, they're quite open to rereleases when circumstances change.

*glances at the three different releases of Clannad: sub-only, dubbed DVD, Blu-ray*

Shaft have announced Prism Nana.

http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2012...ic-girl-project

Apologies for being off-topic, but what's the logic behind selling combo DVD/Blu-ray releases? Seems like an invitation to sell the format you don't want on eBay.

From what I know, it's about lower distribution costs and encouragement for people with DVD players but no BD player to buy this so they don't have the dilemma of "buy now and watch, or buy later with better quality".

which is pretty much non-existent as far as people who watch anime on blu-ray.

They could just release the DVD.

That seems like a bad move on their part, waste money releasing something a lot of people would not buy.

Especially given what they did with Clannad. Seems to me that they took a risk and just fell through as a result.

So even with the facts we have, it's pretty clear Sentai is partly at fault Well fault is probably not the right word, but they're getting what they deserve I guess.

That's what I've heard to, but they tend to emphasize the former point more than the latter.

Either way, was planning on getting Persona 4 only on DVD at the moment, so hey.

It's also a waste of money to mostly* produce a bluray and then not release it for x months. (I guess we have no way of knowing the exact timing here, but the original solicitation came out June 19th and said dual-language, and the release date is about a month and a half from today.)

I'm pretty sure Sentai covered every option discussed in this thread (and then some probably), and based on their calculations/projections, decided that this was the "least-worst" option. I would also have to think they have access to A LOT more data than we do, which isn't to say they're infallible though.

Of course, the other issue is that we'll probably never know if they were right or not. The fact that I'm not going to buy it now doesn't make their decision wrong, or even if 1,000 people cancel their order. Does the money made now offset the time-value of money lost with a better release at a later date? How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?

It's not a waste of money to produce a blu-ray and you can sell it later, versus producing a blu-ray that never sells? I'm implicitly assuming by delaying the releas Sentai may have gotten away with something they otherwise can't if they release it day-date. Of course I think at this point it's all second guessing. I'm not going to guess why removing the japanese dub becomes the only option, besides that to say there are other things these companies could have done. since it seems most people don't look at this problem in this way.

Actually one thing about these kind of contracts is that they might be required to put out certain things, or refrained from doing certain things. it may be the "least-worst" option but that means nothing if we don't know what the valid alternatives were.

to me this was never an issue. because it doesn't really matter.

fwiw they could be paying for their crimes of releasing IS like the way they did, lol.

I think Sentai thinks it will sell, at least well enough to cover the cost of the "extra" bluray release. If, as we're guessing, the plan is to release a dual-language bluray later on, then all this release has to do is break-even on the additional production costs.

Why would Sentai release it if they thought otherwise? It's probably a gamble (not many things in business aren't), but a delay is a sure loss of profit, this release is a potential loss (or maybe even a profit).

Then why would you list alternatives if you don't know they're valid?

lots of reasons. contract, too late in the production process, etc.

by valid meaning did sentai
1. thought about this going in even?
2. were these available? who vetoed it and why?
3. and maybe they were valid alternatives!
I mean just because I don't know if it is valid doesn't mean I can't list them?

The point is NOT if it is the least-worse or not. the point is more about why we are in the place we're in, and really, all parties part to the reasons why we are in the state we are in have a stake in this fault game that fans like to play. realistically speaking we can't play this game right unless we know more details. but i guess that stops nobody.

all i am saying is blaming it on "reverse importation" is not wrong, but there's a lot more to it than that. usually when things turn out like this a lot of other things have to go wrong as well.

so today's big news so far is the Jpanaese BD BOX for Cowboy Bebop. Funny thing is it has an Amazon exclusive version which will not be heavily discounted versus the regular edition box. After discount the box is actually not ridiculously priced given what you're getting. Which is to say, it's one of those shows that probably needs to have the CG re-done in order to look good.

in other news (more old news than new news), who lives near Detroit?
http://aramatheydidnt.livejournal.com/4064021.html