Quote:
Originally Posted by ultimatemegax
If anyone notes any errors in my analysis, please point them out. I thought this would be an interesting exercise to examine. These are also sales recorded by Oricon, so this is a bare minimum in amount sold and the percentages covered by sales is easily more.
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Yeah I think this is an important caveat. The very few times we get independent data from distributors, numbers tend to be a good bit higher than Oricon. We use Oricon because it's the best we've got and allows reasonably good like-to-like comparisons, not because it gives us a true, complete count of discs sold.
Mouretsu was absurdly cheap for an anime, so indeed home video sales would count for less than usual even with really solid sales. Though I don't think they would have priced it how they did if such a price would have needed 20k+ to be worth it. I think Mouretsu sold better than anyone expected, and certainly King Records had planned to print far less copies than it ended up selling (hence that sub-4k v1 wk1). There's no reason why they couldn't have added an extra two discs and honestly sold about the same average. Someone had to have done the math at some point and said 7 was okay.
It's an important point about price, though. I saw someone recently comment on how Hyouka "wasn't doing all that much better than Mouretsu", but when you actually compare the ¥ sales of the first three volumes of each, Hyouka is making literally three times as much per episode. Put another way, 9-10k of Hyouka is equivalent to 21-28k of Mouretsu. That definitely matters.