Anime as an industry has evolved from being invested to one property, into a popcorn type thing where: one title is made, tossed, and a new one is made. People like to picture this as not milking a franchise and having new material, but as you can see when Haruhi had only one season they still milked that franchise to death. Now don’t mistake investment in making new spin offs or sequels from the same franchise, which is an investment, which is different from milking, which is nothing more except churning random shitting merchandise that is worth nothing.
Now that the recession has hit every corner of the earth, we see the anime industry shift from cranking so much new property, they decided to go sequel routes. You can see from fall list coming out though, a lot of them are sequels of franchise with cliffhangers, loose end, or fan demands. The studios did not ignore market research to exploit those series some more, and by no means is this milking a franchise; instead it is quenching fans thirst in the best way possible, and that is with new titles from those series.
Take for example “To Aru Kagaku no Railgun.” Is a spin off of the Index series, but the quality of the show so far has been quite high, and is still risky to invest into it. Since it is a recession it is still overall safer to invest in this then J.C. Staff doing a completely new series from an untested property. This gives the anime more exploitation business wise, and the fans are not left with only merchandise, and instead are given a new show. I think this is a win win situation, as before we were given new series left and right, then a ton of merchandise, which left me with a sense of no connection with the series. The new model leaves fans with a lot of time with a franchise, letting the overall series to have more recognition leading to more sales, and forcing fans not to shift there money to a new series, which can lead them to a different studio’s work.
The anime industry unlike before is playing it safe, and that may not be such a bad thing. Before was a time of experiment, where a model of 13 episodes, then new series worked well. Still as time went on it was not a safe investment for both fans and the company, and cheapen the property instead of giving it more value. Maybe a recession isn’t so bad after all.
-Raito
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