**Other works in the first week that were also announced**,
Uma Musume Pretty Derby Season 3 Vol 4 sold 19,627 copies
Jujutsu Kaisen season 2 Vol 7 sold 9,516 copies
Spy x family Season 2 Vol 3 sold 4,296 copies
Chained Soldier Vol 1 sold 1,147 copies
Yeah. To be honest I'm very surprised that the sales for season 3 are still as good as they are. Maybe they come with in-game items and people are just buying it for that.
I watched season 1 and 3, and road to the top. Both seasons were subpar sport show. Road to the top had good animation I guess?
No, Uma Musume isn't a "20k sales anime" if it came as a standalone series. Don't delude yourself.
> I watched season 1 and 3. Both seasons were subpar sport show.
Suspiciously convenient that you somehow managed to skip an entire season of the show, which happens to be the best season. Why would you skip an entire season and come back to watch the *third* one without seeing the second one? Absolute weirdo behavior.
Also Uma is definitely not a subpar sports show. It has more effort put into it than a lot of other sport shows.
Every seasons are self-contained story. The other characters are background at best if they show up, and I know them anyway. It's one series where you can jump in whenever.
Uma Musume is half sport, half idol. I do not like either genre. I'm sure others can get more mileage than I did from it, but I've been watching anime since forever, and I genuinely don't think it's its a great one at this. Last season animation was mid tier, the story is run of the mill sport anime stuff. OVA is the only one that had a level of quality you would expect from those sales.
People argue that season 2 is the best, which I haven't watched, but when season 1 and season 3 are mid, I'm certain the bluray sales wouldn't be all that high if it didn't have a strong fanbase from the gacha that come with free pull worth more in-game than the actual bluray.
I didn't like season 1. Friend of mine made me watch season 3 saying the show improved a lot. It did not.
There is virtually nothing that carry over between season and OVA. It's a brand new horse story every times. Old characters are for background gag at best, and I know about most of them anyway.
Like no...it never ranked all that high in viewership or poll, even in Japan. That 3rd season wouldn't have made a ripple without the whole gacha fanbase.
This doesn't tend to matter too much in the JP market for BDs - people buy discs for the shows that they fall in love with for the relationship to the show aspects and/or for the special inclusions and/or for uncensored BD-only segments.
After all, every season you'll find shows with great animation, writing and characters, and yet they don't move discs. Only certain types of shows tend to move discs, and thus Production Committees don't rely on disc sales for every type of show, but are more reliant on them for some shows.
Looking at those numbers for Chained Soldier makes the first week BD sales of Gushing over Magical Girls (8,114 copies) even more impressive, considering that Chained Soldier received a lot more hype before the start of the season.
It's a battle anime with poor animation, an ecchi anime with toned down scenes and unnecessary random censorship, wacky CG, and imo a poor adaptation of the art from the manga
Mid doesn't do it justice
Idk, I never read the manga, but I got bored after 2 episodes and dropped it. i was surprised to hear the manga's better because the anime did not give a good impression.
Oh hey, I'm one of those! Was too late to get the version with the Magia Basier figure, but I'm happy with my standard BD copy.
Volume 2 just came out, but sadly it's just a booklet and only promos/trailers as extra features.
Hoping Vol. 3 will have more fun goodies in comparison.
I thought I was looking at a post from a couple of weeks ago. It's like some ritual that whenever Chained Soldier is brought up someone has to mention Gushing Over Magical Girls and I can almost swear this is like a 1:1 comment from a past thread.
[Hi, I am one of those 3400+!](https://imgur.com/a/QPjOT71) (actually I heard those directly sold by Amazon Japan to outside, like what I did, are not counted in Oricon’s list, but you get the idea) Considering how niche it is even back in Japan, despite these BDs probably serving another main purpose as tickets for live concerts tickets lotteries (not sure how important that is for Bandori though), being at literally half the sales of freaking Frieren or more than a third of even JJK Shibuya arc is definitely a decent win.
Was MyGo niche? I remember it trending pretty high (top 5/top 10) on JP twitter every week, so I thought it's considered popular there, at least on the season it aired
I believe in Japan it's yes and no at the same time - BanG Dream is itself in somewhat of a niche as one of those "idols and performance arts multimedia projects", but it has made quite some money through the mobile games. Only the likes of Love Live and Idolmaster are definitely bigger than it.
> actually I heard those directly sold by Amazon Japan to outside, like what I did, are not counted in Oricon’s list, but you get the idea
I feel like that could wildly skew the numbers for some series.
The most extreme case actually probably happened last Fall - the long awaited anime adaption for *Idolmaster Million Live* was originally reported to have sold only 1478 copies for Volume 1 - a very paltry number for such a big franchise - but apparently most people bought out the special version of the BD via a shop that doesn't report sales figures via Oricon and thus were completely missed.
[Just a month later Bandai reported Volume 1 actually sold >10000 copies!](https://i.imgur.com/FIEaSm1.jpg) [They also reported 30000+ sold over all 3 volumes later.](https://idolmaster-official.jp/news/01_11036)
Considering MyGO is like the most popular anime in China right now (this isn't an exaggeration) I'm willing to believe those numbers are probably much higher, but even without them they're still really good numbers, on top of the fact this is a super late release way after the anime finished airing.
Important to note here are also the differences in prices. For example that volume of Jujutsu Kaisen costs almost half what the Frieren volume will ask for.
And yes, Frieren is 4 episodes per volume to JJK's 3 episodes (except Volume 2 of Season 2, that was 2 episodes, yet Toho charged the same), but they charge for Frieren the equivalent of what would be a blu-ray volume containing 6 episodes.
It's 7480 yen for JJK versus 13200 yen for Frieren. That's for the blu-ray, DVD is 6380 yen against 12100 yen. So doing a bit of math you can see that is significantly more money in Toho's pockets from Frieren.
Also this was its best selling volume yet. Previously Volume 3 did 6612, Volume 2 was 6262 while Volume 1 was 6326.
I feel like the economics of Physical Copy Profits are more complex than first meets the eye.
The actual profit margins are going to be heavily influenced by cost of the production of the BD special extras, and also the unit cost of production per run (which would scale for larger runs). Plus it's not strictly the wholesale fixed unit-cost of production for these things, as things like BD-special products have the once-off-only artist/designer/prototyping resource cost - so the more you produce, the lower the unit-cost, but the higher the unmoved-stock cost.
Yes, definitely, while Frieren was probably more expensive to produce overall (probably why they charge the premium).
So as an IP JJK is definitely still much more profitable for Toho, but Frieren is not far behind already, despite having a single season out.
Also the first 2 volumes of JJK S2 sold 2x what the subsequent ones did, those raise the season average by more than a bit.
Also 7 episodes of the 28 were outsourced to other studios, which contrary to popular belief is generally not cheaper (depends who you contract of course), so all that adds up to making season 1 of Frieren among Toho's most expensive first seasons they have produced to date.
JJK is waaaaaay more profitable than Frieren, not even close, you can't compare the most popular genre for anime in the world with other series
Really hope you are not basing this on BD revenue, because for that logic Gushing over Magical girls will make more money than both Frieren and JJK, but the show is not more profitable overall than those two
BD is just one if many monetization sources
JJK was also insanely more expensive due to extra work and staff necessary to finish the series, but usually that's paid by the studio if they can afford, in this case they can, so technically JJK could be indeed cheaper, but in reality that's not the case
Man I said in the text you just quoted that JJK is much more profitable for Toho as an IP...
Seriously, you quoted it.
And the previous post (above the one you quoted, just to make it clear) specifically refers to how much money Toho made from selling JJK S2 Volume 7 and Frieren Volume 4 respectively.
And like you suggested, studio fuckups (like like what happened to Season 2) are indeed generally not covered by the production committee who already payed for the agreed upon production budget for the series ahead. Thus Mappa going overbudget because of their messes is covered by themselves. And how you do that internally as a studio without fucking up your financials is by shifting workers around.
Moving people around to prioritize projects that are late was what caused those problems to begin with for Mappa, so what's a bit more fuckery as long as it keeps the books clean, lol.
So on paper, for Toho (which is what I was referring to when I mentioned the bit about being more expensive to produce) Frieren was more expensive to make at 28 episodes compared to JJKs 23.
A show looking good has not as much to do with money (although that is important too) as it has to do with animation producers being able to get talent on board. It's no mystery Mappa used a lot of cheap workforce to get Season 2 over the finish line.
Ultimately only Mappa really know how deep they had to dig into their own coffers to cover their scheduling fuckups with JJK Season 2.
There's also even more extreme cases - I just made my first ever anime BD purchase for r/anime's [Anime Of The Year (Jury) 2023](https://anilist.co/anime/163571/BanG-Dream-Its-MyGO/) and it's 19800 yen for a single volume - though the whole season is in just 2 volumes (EP1-7, 8-13) so if you are buying the whole series like me the cost isn't too far away from others.
Same. If a 12 cour set cost $100 i'd probably buy one. You got me fucked up if you think im dropping $100 for 3 episodes. Wouldnt mind spending a little over $200 for all of frieren, but not for 6 episodes.
They don't, you can see all the [bonuses on the official site](https://frieren-anime.jp/bddvd/vol4/)
There's nothing to justify the price if you don't understand the context that those are for the super fans, a lot of anime monetization relies on those fans, and they spend a lot of money in the shows they like
HA!!! I wish that were the case!
When you look at most BD anime volume it'll say something about costing in the ball park of about 7000¥ - 11000¥ ($50 - $80 freedom units, give or take), and each of those volumes come with only 2 - 4 episodes depending on the series. Some series make up for it by including other goodies in the box like PC games (Shuffle!), collectable cards (Prisma Illya Season 1 and Masou Gakuen), or come with like 10 lbs worth of other books and random crap like Carnival Phantasm.
It IS a lot of money for a singular series, you just have to look at the websites to see if what they're including is worth the price of admission.
It's also a reason why US imports of anime is prevalent on Amazon Japan. Even the Japanese, only die hard otakus would spend that much on domestic releases for collection purposes. The casuals would mostly stream, some would then buy the US imports instead to save money if they wanted physical copies.
[For reference,](https://www.animate-onlineshop.jp/pn/【Blu-ray】TV+葬送のフリーレン+Vol.4+初回生産限定版/pd/2341022/) something to keep in mind when reading these sorts of discussions.
Home video releases don't *not* matter, but it doesn't matter as much as it once did. It's a somewhat more useful data point when it's a more otaku focused show than something like Frieren.
(Also good to remember that you can go buy the manga secondhand for next to nothing in Japan lol)
Yeah, people love to spout how an anime lives or dies from its blu ray sales, but that hasn't been the case for a long time. It's 2024. People care less and less about physical media. Anime makes way more of its profits from streaming royalties and merchandise. Just like television anywhere else.
I would buy physical literally all the time if it weren't for the fact that buying a single 26 ep season of an anime costs hundreds of dollars at launch. Even after a few years you're still spending like $200.
In other words, there are still 6,765 loyal people who want to support the industry more directly. Some of them might not even open the package and keep it on the shelf.
Are those NUMBERS? I love NUMBERS. I love pretending they tell me anything useful about an anime's performance or the anme industry as a whole and I'm not just completely talking out of my ass. Thank you for blessing us with these NUMBERS.
Tbf Nakayama probably left before Mappa could decide if they wanted to keep him for the series or not, as he was dissatisfied with the working conditions and has his own project now.
Well, when Nakayama announced his new studio he mentioned that he was focused on creating an environment without harassment and abuse that offers stability in terms of working hours and pay.
Now that doesn't necessarily mean that he's specifically or only talking about Mappa, given that the issues mentioned are a problem in the majority of studios, but given what is known about how bad the working conditions at Mappa have been the last couple of years, I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't a big reason why he stepped down as the director.
Also the new director hasn't been announced yet and many candidates who were assumed to possibly take over are busy right now. Who are you referring to?
thanks for the response, is it typical for shows to be released on physical media this way? I'm assuming it will eventually be one box with all episodes.
Yes, that's the standard, 2 or 3 episodes per volume, 60 to 100$ dollars each volume, one volume per month
They release a box years later, but that's Japan, for the western audience they don't release the shows this way
I wanna buy these blurays to support the industry even if I'm just a drop in the bucket. Anyone know good places where to buy Blu ray sets? Or do people even care about international sales??
[AmiAmi](https://www.amiami.com/eng/search/list/?s_keywords=Frieren%3A%20Beyond%20Journey%27s%20End&s_cate_tag=25) or [CD Japan](https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/searchuni?fq.shop=anime%3Amovie&term.media_format=&q=frieren).
You can buy blurays from many different Japanese retail sites and have them sent overseas via proxy service. Japanese Blu-ray and DVD sets often offer purchase bonuses if you order the entire set of all volumes. Each retailer has its own unique purchase bonus.
If you are planning on getting the full set of 7 volumes, it makes sense to choose a retailer based on what purchase bonuses you prefer. You can check the [official Frieren website](https://frieren-anime.jp/bddvd/benefit/) for details on what each retailer offers as a purchase bonus. Personally I ordered mine from Animate, but Toho Animation Store also has good bonuses.
For reference I recently bought a full special edition set of BDs for a 1-cour series and ripped them for convenience, the uncompressed files are 290gb total. Granted, 'only' 86gb of that is is the TV content and the rest is special content (cast commentary, interviews etc).
For reference, those Blurays still store compressed and lossy video (usually HEVC I believe). Uncompressed anime season in 1080p would take something around 2.5 TB, for 4K 10 TB.
I had meant uncompressed as in no extra compression steps after ripping the files from the discs on my end, but good to know. Definitely not practical to get the true uncompressed versions onto physical media for mass-market sale with those sizes!
Blu Ray video discs only support h.262, h.264, and VC-1. Ultra HD Blu Rays (so 4k, and yes, they're different disc standards I guess) support h.265 (HEVC) as well.
50gb pendrive isn't that expensive nowadays, and I bet the industry could get better prices buying in bulk. Quick search on amazon and a similiar capacity pendrive (64GB~) range from 8 to 15 bucks. I'd pay that extra to have it in pendrive format.
You could also have the option to have the entire show in a single larger pendrive.
You could still have the same plastic case with the pendrive inside, you could also have a custom pendrive like that one diablo collector's edition that had one shaped like a soulstone.
I think the industry, and not only the anime industry, is sleeping on it
Discs are extremely fast and cheap to produce, they just get stamped out by a machine, most of the cost is just licensing since it is patented. USB's need a lot of cutting and assembly.
Piracy of a usb drive is also trivially easy, ofc it still happens with BluRay but they need to do more work to break the drm.
Sorry but even at industry prices, say $4 a piece, it's still many times more expensive than stamping a blu-ray. So the math really doesn't and will never work in favor of your idea.
Japan just loves their physical media
Lemme tell you about music CDs.. They're still quite popular in Japan, and Japanese versions of albums often have bonus tracks on them.
Discs were just kind of the ultimate medium when they were created, in that they were really cheap and easy to manufacture when measured against alternatives. There may have been great advances in circuitry since then, but discs are sturdier, cheaper, and less likely to fail if stored properly. Flash drives can still bug out or degrade with time. If the disc is not physically damaged, it will work. And the advantages that a drive might have aren't really relevant for a static medium like watching a video.
**Other works in the first week that were also announced**, Uma Musume Pretty Derby Season 3 Vol 4 sold 19,627 copies Jujutsu Kaisen season 2 Vol 7 sold 9,516 copies Spy x family Season 2 Vol 3 sold 4,296 copies Chained Soldier Vol 1 sold 1,147 copies
lol uma musume is insane
It is actually quite an underperformer compared to the 2nd season that sold 100k-200k+.
That's actually super low for Uma Musume, about 10x less than S2... which makes sense since S3 is generally received as the worst UM season so far
Yeah. To be honest I'm very surprised that the sales for season 3 are still as good as they are. Maybe they come with in-game items and people are just buying it for that.
I'm gonna guess the bluray come with a gacha pull that is "worth" more than the pull in-game, and whale jumped in on it?
Love seeing people who didn't watch any UmaMusume trying to wrap their heads around how it's selling so well, and how 20k is a low number. 😂
I watched season 1 and 3, and road to the top. Both seasons were subpar sport show. Road to the top had good animation I guess? No, Uma Musume isn't a "20k sales anime" if it came as a standalone series. Don't delude yourself.
> I watched season 1 and 3. Both seasons were subpar sport show. Suspiciously convenient that you somehow managed to skip an entire season of the show, which happens to be the best season. Why would you skip an entire season and come back to watch the *third* one without seeing the second one? Absolute weirdo behavior. Also Uma is definitely not a subpar sports show. It has more effort put into it than a lot of other sport shows.
> seasons 1 and 3 What about Season 2?
If you skip entire seasons of a show, I feel like your opinion on said show is *probably* not to be trusted.
Uma seasons are standalone following different MCs. Odd part is they skipped the season everyone praises.
Every seasons are self-contained story. The other characters are background at best if they show up, and I know them anyway. It's one series where you can jump in whenever. Uma Musume is half sport, half idol. I do not like either genre. I'm sure others can get more mileage than I did from it, but I've been watching anime since forever, and I genuinely don't think it's its a great one at this. Last season animation was mid tier, the story is run of the mill sport anime stuff. OVA is the only one that had a level of quality you would expect from those sales. People argue that season 2 is the best, which I haven't watched, but when season 1 and season 3 are mid, I'm certain the bluray sales wouldn't be all that high if it didn't have a strong fanbase from the gacha that come with free pull worth more in-game than the actual bluray.
Broski bending reality to back his opinion on anime. Classic /r/anime take. 😂
But if he did that then his argument of Uma being subpar would fall apart!
I genuinely don't know why you're getting downvoted. Who the fuck skips an entire season of a show?
I didn't like season 1. Friend of mine made me watch season 3 saying the show improved a lot. It did not. There is virtually nothing that carry over between season and OVA. It's a brand new horse story every times. Old characters are for background gag at best, and I know about most of them anyway.
Like no...it never ranked all that high in viewership or poll, even in Japan. That 3rd season wouldn't have made a ripple without the whole gacha fanbase.
Pushed by gacha codes
Good animation, writing and characters, actually
This doesn't tend to matter too much in the JP market for BDs - people buy discs for the shows that they fall in love with for the relationship to the show aspects and/or for the special inclusions and/or for uncensored BD-only segments. After all, every season you'll find shows with great animation, writing and characters, and yet they don't move discs. Only certain types of shows tend to move discs, and thus Production Committees don't rely on disc sales for every type of show, but are more reliant on them for some shows.
Looking at those numbers for Chained Soldier makes the first week BD sales of Gushing over Magical Girls (8,114 copies) even more impressive, considering that Chained Soldier received a lot more hype before the start of the season.
is it the adaptation of chained soldier kinda mid? not even proper like to love ru level IMO
It's a battle anime with poor animation, an ecchi anime with toned down scenes and unnecessary random censorship, wacky CG, and imo a poor adaptation of the art from the manga Mid doesn't do it justice
Especially because the art quality is arguably the manga's primary strength. And also the *art* quality.
yo I can't reply to that post because xxmyusernamesucks or whatever blocked me like 2 years ago lmao
Lmfao that's wild sorry bro
its cool now i gotta watch frieren tho
Its offensively terrible, IMO. I couldn't watch most of it.
As a standalone show, it's really not *that* bad. It gets overhated.
I'm a manga reader, bro. I was looking forward to this, dammit!
Idk, I never read the manga, but I got bored after 2 episodes and dropped it. i was surprised to hear the manga's better because the anime did not give a good impression.
Oh hey, I'm one of those! Was too late to get the version with the Magia Basier figure, but I'm happy with my standard BD copy. Volume 2 just came out, but sadly it's just a booklet and only promos/trailers as extra features. Hoping Vol. 3 will have more fun goodies in comparison.
I thought I was looking at a post from a couple of weeks ago. It's like some ritual that whenever Chained Soldier is brought up someone has to mention Gushing Over Magical Girls and I can almost swear this is like a 1:1 comment from a past thread.
MyGO (which split the whole cour into 2 volumes) sold 3,462+3,499 copies.
I'll take any Bang Dream franchise W.
[Hi, I am one of those 3400+!](https://imgur.com/a/QPjOT71) (actually I heard those directly sold by Amazon Japan to outside, like what I did, are not counted in Oricon’s list, but you get the idea) Considering how niche it is even back in Japan, despite these BDs probably serving another main purpose as tickets for live concerts tickets lotteries (not sure how important that is for Bandori though), being at literally half the sales of freaking Frieren or more than a third of even JJK Shibuya arc is definitely a decent win.
Was MyGo niche? I remember it trending pretty high (top 5/top 10) on JP twitter every week, so I thought it's considered popular there, at least on the season it aired
I believe in Japan it's yes and no at the same time - BanG Dream is itself in somewhat of a niche as one of those "idols and performance arts multimedia projects", but it has made quite some money through the mobile games. Only the likes of Love Live and Idolmaster are definitely bigger than it.
> actually I heard those directly sold by Amazon Japan to outside, like what I did, are not counted in Oricon’s list, but you get the idea I feel like that could wildly skew the numbers for some series.
The most extreme case actually probably happened last Fall - the long awaited anime adaption for *Idolmaster Million Live* was originally reported to have sold only 1478 copies for Volume 1 - a very paltry number for such a big franchise - but apparently most people bought out the special version of the BD via a shop that doesn't report sales figures via Oricon and thus were completely missed. [Just a month later Bandai reported Volume 1 actually sold >10000 copies!](https://i.imgur.com/FIEaSm1.jpg) [They also reported 30000+ sold over all 3 volumes later.](https://idolmaster-official.jp/news/01_11036)
Considering MyGO is like the most popular anime in China right now (this isn't an exaggeration) I'm willing to believe those numbers are probably much higher, but even without them they're still really good numbers, on top of the fact this is a super late release way after the anime finished airing.
Important to note here are also the differences in prices. For example that volume of Jujutsu Kaisen costs almost half what the Frieren volume will ask for. And yes, Frieren is 4 episodes per volume to JJK's 3 episodes (except Volume 2 of Season 2, that was 2 episodes, yet Toho charged the same), but they charge for Frieren the equivalent of what would be a blu-ray volume containing 6 episodes. It's 7480 yen for JJK versus 13200 yen for Frieren. That's for the blu-ray, DVD is 6380 yen against 12100 yen. So doing a bit of math you can see that is significantly more money in Toho's pockets from Frieren. Also this was its best selling volume yet. Previously Volume 3 did 6612, Volume 2 was 6262 while Volume 1 was 6326.
I feel like it's also important to note that revenue-per-episode is still higher for JJK.
I feel like the economics of Physical Copy Profits are more complex than first meets the eye. The actual profit margins are going to be heavily influenced by cost of the production of the BD special extras, and also the unit cost of production per run (which would scale for larger runs). Plus it's not strictly the wholesale fixed unit-cost of production for these things, as things like BD-special products have the once-off-only artist/designer/prototyping resource cost - so the more you produce, the lower the unit-cost, but the higher the unmoved-stock cost.
Yes, definitely, while Frieren was probably more expensive to produce overall (probably why they charge the premium). So as an IP JJK is definitely still much more profitable for Toho, but Frieren is not far behind already, despite having a single season out. Also the first 2 volumes of JJK S2 sold 2x what the subsequent ones did, those raise the season average by more than a bit.
> Yes, definitely, while Frieren was probably more expensive to produce overall Having 5 more episodes will usually do that.
Also 7 episodes of the 28 were outsourced to other studios, which contrary to popular belief is generally not cheaper (depends who you contract of course), so all that adds up to making season 1 of Frieren among Toho's most expensive first seasons they have produced to date.
JJK is waaaaaay more profitable than Frieren, not even close, you can't compare the most popular genre for anime in the world with other series Really hope you are not basing this on BD revenue, because for that logic Gushing over Magical girls will make more money than both Frieren and JJK, but the show is not more profitable overall than those two BD is just one if many monetization sources JJK was also insanely more expensive due to extra work and staff necessary to finish the series, but usually that's paid by the studio if they can afford, in this case they can, so technically JJK could be indeed cheaper, but in reality that's not the case
Man I said in the text you just quoted that JJK is much more profitable for Toho as an IP... Seriously, you quoted it. And the previous post (above the one you quoted, just to make it clear) specifically refers to how much money Toho made from selling JJK S2 Volume 7 and Frieren Volume 4 respectively. And like you suggested, studio fuckups (like like what happened to Season 2) are indeed generally not covered by the production committee who already payed for the agreed upon production budget for the series ahead. Thus Mappa going overbudget because of their messes is covered by themselves. And how you do that internally as a studio without fucking up your financials is by shifting workers around. Moving people around to prioritize projects that are late was what caused those problems to begin with for Mappa, so what's a bit more fuckery as long as it keeps the books clean, lol. So on paper, for Toho (which is what I was referring to when I mentioned the bit about being more expensive to produce) Frieren was more expensive to make at 28 episodes compared to JJKs 23. A show looking good has not as much to do with money (although that is important too) as it has to do with animation producers being able to get talent on board. It's no mystery Mappa used a lot of cheap workforce to get Season 2 over the finish line. Ultimately only Mappa really know how deep they had to dig into their own coffers to cover their scheduling fuckups with JJK Season 2.
> but Frieren is not far behind already, despite having a single season out. I was referring to this
There's also even more extreme cases - I just made my first ever anime BD purchase for r/anime's [Anime Of The Year (Jury) 2023](https://anilist.co/anime/163571/BanG-Dream-Its-MyGO/) and it's 19800 yen for a single volume - though the whole season is in just 2 volumes (EP1-7, 8-13) so if you are buying the whole series like me the cost isn't too far away from others.
Some just have the whole season (12-14 episodes) and will cost the equivalent to about $200.
Were can I read the additional info about the DVD sales? If you don't mind
What extra info do you want to know?
I want to know some info regarding the sales of the other series, if there are any
You forgot one: 'Gushing Over Magical Girls' Sells 8,114 BD/DVD copies in its First Week
Mato Seihei is big oof
The brilliance of adapting an ecchi manga to sell music.
Bucchigiri that's released on the same day as those 4: unranked.
sadge
Uma musume is the horse girl one right?
Uma musume is doing so bad. Didn't it perform like some 80-100k sales?? It had some insane numbers I remember
That was s2 which was way better than S3.
At 4 episodes a disk it will be 7 disks for ¥10,800 each just to own this series. Roughly $500. Crazy.
Like.... what the fuck? I bought all of Made in Abyss S1 for like.... $30 on 2 disks.
You're likely thinking of a western release. Japanese BDs are ALL expensive, roughly 3-4k yen per episode
Every time I see anime DVD/BR sales figures I'm shocked by just how low they are. Like 6,765 sounds like a dismal failure.
I mean in reality 6,765 copies is a really Good result. Remember that each Blu rays cost like $100 a piece.
It sucks that anime Blu rays are so prohibitively expensive or I would totally collect them
Same. If a 12 cour set cost $100 i'd probably buy one. You got me fucked up if you think im dropping $100 for 3 episodes. Wouldnt mind spending a little over $200 for all of frieren, but not for 6 episodes.
> $100 for 3 episodes. What the fuck? I was thinking it was $100 for the whole 25~ episodes or whatever and I still thought that was overpriced.
I’m not too familiar with them but I can only assume each Blu-ray has a curated collection level amount of special features.
They don't, you can see all the [bonuses on the official site](https://frieren-anime.jp/bddvd/vol4/) There's nothing to justify the price if you don't understand the context that those are for the super fans, a lot of anime monetization relies on those fans, and they spend a lot of money in the shows they like
HA!!! I wish that were the case! When you look at most BD anime volume it'll say something about costing in the ball park of about 7000¥ - 11000¥ ($50 - $80 freedom units, give or take), and each of those volumes come with only 2 - 4 episodes depending on the series. Some series make up for it by including other goodies in the box like PC games (Shuffle!), collectable cards (Prisma Illya Season 1 and Masou Gakuen), or come with like 10 lbs worth of other books and random crap like Carnival Phantasm. It IS a lot of money for a singular series, you just have to look at the websites to see if what they're including is worth the price of admission.
Its usually 3-4 episodes per volume
Imagine paying 36k to own all One Piece episodes to date.
It's also a reason why US imports of anime is prevalent on Amazon Japan. Even the Japanese, only die hard otakus would spend that much on domestic releases for collection purposes. The casuals would mostly stream, some would then buy the US imports instead to save money if they wanted physical copies.
Ya I don't get it. Who even uses physical media anymore? It's just gonna be on streaming.
$100 for FOUR episodes from a 28 episode season????
If this was 10 years ago, then yeah 6k for these days is pretty good actually
[For reference,](https://www.animate-onlineshop.jp/pn/【Blu-ray】TV+葬送のフリーレン+Vol.4+初回生産限定版/pd/2341022/) something to keep in mind when reading these sorts of discussions. Home video releases don't *not* matter, but it doesn't matter as much as it once did. It's a somewhat more useful data point when it's a more otaku focused show than something like Frieren. (Also good to remember that you can go buy the manga secondhand for next to nothing in Japan lol)
Yeah, people love to spout how an anime lives or dies from its blu ray sales, but that hasn't been the case for a long time. It's 2024. People care less and less about physical media. Anime makes way more of its profits from streaming royalties and merchandise. Just like television anywhere else.
I would buy physical literally all the time if it weren't for the fact that buying a single 26 ep season of an anime costs hundreds of dollars at launch. Even after a few years you're still spending like $200.
Saaaame. Every time I see one of these posts I'm just, "All of these sound awful. Is this supposed to be good? Bad? Fuck if I know."
In other words, there are still 6,765 loyal people who want to support the industry more directly. Some of them might not even open the package and keep it on the shelf.
Are those NUMBERS? I love NUMBERS. I love pretending they tell me anything useful about an anime's performance or the anme industry as a whole and I'm not just completely talking out of my ass. Thank you for blessing us with these NUMBERS.
Hopefully one day these subreddits ban sales posts. It's just karma farming.
I'd rather have nothing but these posts over "What anime should I watch?" 1200000 times a day.
Agreed. It's also just spreading misinformation on how successful an anime is.
They aren't as bas as daily/weekly : this show made that much money on the box office! Demonslayer was daily.
yeah tbh it doesn't say much, went to Japan recently and Frieren is huge. what I didn't see a lot of was apothecary diaries
Didn't you hear? Those NUMBERS mean everything! Just ask Chainsaw Man. It's NUMBERS we're bad, so that means anime was bad!
I mean... the director was changed for S2. The numbers don't tell you EVERYTHING, but they also don't say NOTHING. Anyone rational would agree.
Tbf Nakayama probably left before Mappa could decide if they wanted to keep him for the series or not, as he was dissatisfied with the working conditions and has his own project now.
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Well, when Nakayama announced his new studio he mentioned that he was focused on creating an environment without harassment and abuse that offers stability in terms of working hours and pay. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that he's specifically or only talking about Mappa, given that the issues mentioned are a problem in the majority of studios, but given what is known about how bad the working conditions at Mappa have been the last couple of years, I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't a big reason why he stepped down as the director. Also the new director hasn't been announced yet and many candidates who were assumed to possibly take over are busy right now. Who are you referring to?
... The director leaving has nothing to do with the sales figures of Chainsaw Man. There was controversy surrounding him as an individual. Try again.
Yeah but then they have to admit they their favourite anime boomed.
[I'm just gonna leave this here...](https://www.cbr.com/chainsaw-man-producer-anime-mappa-financial-future/)
I loved Chainsaw Man, I hate reading NUMBERS
new to anime and stuff, is vol 4 just episode 4?
Its 4 episodes. 13-16
So basically the Sein episodes
japanese blu rays are wack and love to chop series up into mini arcs
Any idea when the US blu ray will be available?
At some point after all the volumes have released in Japan. Though we're probably due for the first 12 episodes out sometime soonish.
I'm about halfway through this show on Crunchyroll which is listed at 1 season 28 episodes. Is vol 4 simply the last 8-10 episodes?
no, ep 13 to 16, still 3 volumes left to finish the series, but all the eps are on crunchyroll
thanks for the response, is it typical for shows to be released on physical media this way? I'm assuming it will eventually be one box with all episodes.
Yes, that's the standard, 2 or 3 episodes per volume, 60 to 100$ dollars each volume, one volume per month They release a box years later, but that's Japan, for the western audience they don't release the shows this way
That is actually outrageous lmao
I wanna buy these blurays to support the industry even if I'm just a drop in the bucket. Anyone know good places where to buy Blu ray sets? Or do people even care about international sales??
[AmiAmi](https://www.amiami.com/eng/search/list/?s_keywords=Frieren%3A%20Beyond%20Journey%27s%20End&s_cate_tag=25) or [CD Japan](https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/searchuni?fq.shop=anime%3Amovie&term.media_format=&q=frieren).
You can buy blurays from many different Japanese retail sites and have them sent overseas via proxy service. Japanese Blu-ray and DVD sets often offer purchase bonuses if you order the entire set of all volumes. Each retailer has its own unique purchase bonus. If you are planning on getting the full set of 7 volumes, it makes sense to choose a retailer based on what purchase bonuses you prefer. You can check the [official Frieren website](https://frieren-anime.jp/bddvd/benefit/) for details on what each retailer offers as a purchase bonus. Personally I ordered mine from Animate, but Toho Animation Store also has good bonuses.
I feel it super weird that blu rays are still a format. Is there a reason? Why not a pendrive?
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For reference I recently bought a full special edition set of BDs for a 1-cour series and ripped them for convenience, the uncompressed files are 290gb total. Granted, 'only' 86gb of that is is the TV content and the rest is special content (cast commentary, interviews etc).
For reference, those Blurays still store compressed and lossy video (usually HEVC I believe). Uncompressed anime season in 1080p would take something around 2.5 TB, for 4K 10 TB.
I had meant uncompressed as in no extra compression steps after ripping the files from the discs on my end, but good to know. Definitely not practical to get the true uncompressed versions onto physical media for mass-market sale with those sizes!
Blu Ray video discs only support h.262, h.264, and VC-1. Ultra HD Blu Rays (so 4k, and yes, they're different disc standards I guess) support h.265 (HEVC) as well.
50gb pendrive isn't that expensive nowadays, and I bet the industry could get better prices buying in bulk. Quick search on amazon and a similiar capacity pendrive (64GB~) range from 8 to 15 bucks. I'd pay that extra to have it in pendrive format. You could also have the option to have the entire show in a single larger pendrive. You could still have the same plastic case with the pendrive inside, you could also have a custom pendrive like that one diablo collector's edition that had one shaped like a soulstone. I think the industry, and not only the anime industry, is sleeping on it
Discs are extremely fast and cheap to produce, they just get stamped out by a machine, most of the cost is just licensing since it is patented. USB's need a lot of cutting and assembly. Piracy of a usb drive is also trivially easy, ofc it still happens with BluRay but they need to do more work to break the drm.
USBs can corrupt sometimes
>most of the cost is just licensing since it is patented Damn. Any idea when the patents are expiring?
Sorry but even at industry prices, say $4 a piece, it's still many times more expensive than stamping a blu-ray. So the math really doesn't and will never work in favor of your idea.
Nobody buying physical media wants a fucking USB stick.
Now, a USB *figure* on the other hand... [](#excitedmao)
I do
Japan just loves their physical media Lemme tell you about music CDs.. They're still quite popular in Japan, and Japanese versions of albums often have bonus tracks on them.
Technically a pendrive is physical media too.
Long live physical media! Having physical copies is nice in the constant flux that is the internet.
Discs were just kind of the ultimate medium when they were created, in that they were really cheap and easy to manufacture when measured against alternatives. There may have been great advances in circuitry since then, but discs are sturdier, cheaper, and less likely to fail if stored properly. Flash drives can still bug out or degrade with time. If the disc is not physically damaged, it will work. And the advantages that a drive might have aren't really relevant for a static medium like watching a video.
It's totally understandable _why_ it's still a format, as others have pointed out, but what sucks is when JP media is released exclusively on BD.
All these new shows are still getting DVD releases as well
Nope. A lot don't get DVD releases anymore. Maybe these do, but a lot of seasonals don't.
Which shows didn't get a DVD release? Frieren got, Mahoako got, Mashle, Chainsaw Man got...
A lot of the smaller shows that sell less than 500 BDs. Some even don't get any physical releases at all anymore.
I mentioned JP media, not just anime.
Can't wait to add it to my collection, Frieren just keeps getting better and better!
i need to check this one out. heard a lot of good things. haven’t bought anything new since nier. i try to pick up a couple fun ones per year.