BigOnAnime · @BigOnAnime
17th Nov 2015 from TwitLonger
Price Doesn't Affect Anime Sales Dramatically
Timestamp 44:20 http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/anncast/2009-12-03
Zac: That brings up another question, I gotta get this in. Was there ever any internal rumbling about switching over to the thinpak box set system that FUNimation's doing now? Because clearly it's doing much better for them than singles.
Chad: There had been talk about doing the releases. But here's the problem we had. We needed to make our budget. And we were releasing- We didn't wait until we had the whole thing dubbed and released. We were releasing it as soon as we possibly could, which meant by the time we got the first volume finished, we hadn't even gotten masters for the second volume, sometimes. So it's kinda like you can see it with the way we did Hellsing. Where it was out, it was released, and we didn't have the volume. That was a more obvious version of the nightmare we lived each and every month for each and every title. Um a lot of them weren't done because we had licensed it when it was going on air, and so that was never an option. It always we have to release the individuals, and we have to shoot for profitability. Because you know what, we tried it at $29.98, and we saw the sales. We tried it at $24.98, and it sold about the same. And we tried a few at $19.98, and it was about the same. Price did not really have that big of an impact, because quite frankly they knew what titles they wanted, "they" being the fans out there. They know what they want, if they willing to pay for it, they were willing to pay for it. And if they weren't willing to pay for it, there was the internet.
Zac: So you just had this core of people buying, and that was it, and you really couldn't expand out?
Chad: There are probably magical price points, but when we're dealing with-Okay if we have to do a bundle at 40 bucks, and the individuals are still at 30, we're going to that market so which will mean we will eventually come out with a bundle, but we have to give it a chance to find its legs. Because for example, Samurai Champloo outsold Naruto for the first year on a volume by volume basis, and we were charging 5 bucks more. Quite frankly-if you remember our other conversations about Rumiko Takahashi and you know, Cybusters, we needed the money!
Zac: So it sounds like waiting for the box set was just death. You just couldn't wait, because you'd be losing money that entire time.
Chad: Pretty much, and we needed the revenue. We had interest payments to make, and we had sales figures to hit, and if we didn't hit them, then heads would roll, and we didn't them anyway, and heads did roll. So it was a very difficult situation to deal with. And we knew that the price point was eroding but at the same time, title, definitely had much more impact. The fact that it said Samurai Champloo on the box cover, meant, much more than the price. There were certain exceptions, and certain times where you could do a bundle and you would do the price point, and it would really make a difference, but since we had to release the individual volumes first, because of the timing and the budget, we couldn't release a low price box set until those had come back. We wanted them to try to sell them as they were. But if we had released the box set at the same time as the last volume, first of all no one would buy the last volume. None of the retailers because they would say "Well this box set is much cheaper. Oh and by the way, since you're undercutting these individual volumes, you can have them all back now." So there was this game. [Me: Meaning Geneon had to pay back the retailers for said unsold volumes they were sending back. This is one of the main things that bankrupted them.]
Zac: Your box sets were never reasonably priced though! Like they were always like 130 buck for Trigun, it was like 130/150.
Chad: $199.98. But that was because it was continuing to sell at $199.98. And in our last 2, 3 years, we did start to have some more reasonably priced box sets. We did Tenchi Universe, it went from like $199 to $79. But when we price it at $79, that means it hits at Best Buy, Musicland, and Amazon at lik $59 or 55 bucks, 50/60 bucks. And it moved, it sold a lot of units and we didn't like the thinpak so much as we liked the multipack. Because in the thinpak you still have to redesign each of the covers and print each of the covers. Which takes your inventory costs and multiples it by 7. And on that single 8-disc cassette that was only 2 DVD amaray-cases wide, that cost us less than half of an 8-disc thinpak.
[Wanted to also get this in.]
Timestamp 67:00 (Go back to 66:00 for the question that sparked this. Not quoting all of that.)
Chad: But no, it was not actively "Let's see how bad can we screw people over". It was, okay, um we're going to sell 5,000 units at $29, and we're going to sell 5,500 units at 24 bucks, and 6,000 units at 19 bucks. There's absolutely no incentive to go at 19 bucks because the extra thousand units cost----you lose money! So we'll make less people happy, but we'll have roughly the same amount of money and we'll hopefully be able to invest that in the future.
(Dialogue not 100% accurate, I tried to get it as close as I could.)