Anime Sales in Japan - 2012

[something]

Upcoming releases for: September 17-23 2012
2012/09/19 Bungaku Shoujo SP BD Box
2012/09/19 Sengoku Collection v6
2012/09/19 Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita v1
2012/09/19 Saki BD Box RE
2012/09/19 Saki Achiga-hen episode of side-A v4
2012/09/19 Koutetsu Tenshi Kurumi BD Box
2012/09/19 Ginga e Kickoff!! v3
2012/09/19 Cardfight!! Vanguard Asia Circuit v2
2012/09/19 Cardfight!! Vanguard v14
2012/09/19 Yuru Yuri♪♪ v1
2012/09/19 Sankarea v4
2012/09/19 Fate/Zero Box v2
2012/09/19 Koe de Oshigoto! BD Box
2012/09/19 Lupin the Third Mine Fujiko to Iu Onna Box
2012/09/19 Fairy Tail Character Collection: Gray
2012/09/19 Fairy Tail Character Collection: Erza
2012/09/21 Rinne no Lagrange season 2 v1
2012/09/21 Binbougami ga! v1
2012/09/21 Hiiro no Kakera v4
2012/09/21 Saint Seiya Omega v2
2012/09/21 Kuroko no Basuke v3
2012/09/21 Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon II v1
2012/09/21 Kidou Senshi Gundam SEED BD Box v3
2012/09/21 Kidou Senshi Gundam AGE v8
2012/09/21 Phi Brain ~Kami no Puzzle Box v1
2012/09/21 Sakura Taisen Teikoku Hanagekidan OVA BD Box
2012/09/21 Eureka Seven AO v4
2012/09/21 Yurumates 3dei plus
2012/09/21 sola BD Box

Interestingly, Binbougami singles are BD only - didn't notice. DVD comes out as a boxset at the end.

[Damius]

Originally Posted by something

Hyouka v3 adds 335 BDs in wk3, total 9,785. Damnit so close. 10k depends on the monthly reporting period being favorable. It would have to include all four first weeks, maybe five.

That sure was close... Well, at least it will over time (if it didn't already did if we add the KyoAni store copies).

Mouretsu v7, final volume, adds 359 BDs, total 7,132. Hooray it got over 7k again. Final average: 7,337.

Let's call this Lucky 7. 7 volumes, over 7000 copies sold and I will hope 7 days a week for a second season.

[something]

Update: 9/20 added

First two days of daily rankings are up, so the order thus far should reflect the weekly. Only have what's on the Oricon website though. 9/18, and 9/19, so pre-sale day and street day for the 9/19 releases.

DVD All Top 20
11 → ** → ** - Sengoku Collection v6
18 → 14 → ** - Lupin the Third Mine Fujiko to Iu Onna Box
** → 18 → ** - Yuru Yuri♪♪ v1

DVD Anime Top 20
*3 → *2 → *8 - Lupin the Third Mine Fujiko to Iu Onna Box
*2 → *5 → ** - Sengoku Collection v6
*4 → *3 → 10 - Yuru Yuri♪♪ v1
*6 → *7 → 15 - Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita v1
*8 → 11 → ** - Saki Achiga-hen v4
10 → ** → ** - Sankarea v4

BD All Top 10
*1 → *1 → *5 - Fate/Zero part 2
*3 → *3 → ** - Yuru Yuri♪♪ v1
*5 → *6 → ** - Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita v1
*6 → *4 → ** - Saki Achiga-hen v4
*7 → 10 → ** - Lupin the Third Mine Fujiko to Iu Onna Box
*9 → ** → ** - Saki BD Box

Roughly speaking, I guess we can expect the following:

Jintai DVD was sandwiched between two volumes of Cardfight, which based on previous volumes should mean ~800 DVDs. BD is about on par with Achiga-hen, so figure ~4,000. In other words, 4-5k is a safe range if DVDs rank. It is Jintai is completely out of stock at Amazon without even an estimates restock though, so we might need to wait until Vol. 2 to get a clear read. The way it catapulted into the top 10 this past week may have caught them off guard.

Yuru Yuri♪♪ holds a clear lead over Achiga and Jintai on both formats, although stock didn't deplete for it. I did see it get down to 3 copies left on Amazon but they got more in before it went OOS for any length of time. It could break ~900-1,000 DVDs and I suppose ~4,000-5,000 BDs is possible. Potential 6k opening week? Depends how front-loaded it is; this could be misleading, putting it closer to 4.5-5k.

Lupin Fujiko looks set to do about SenColle's DVD number which ought ot be around ~1,300 or so. BDs are well below Achiga-hen so far, which means below 4,000 for sure unless it has a strong late week. I really have no idea what to guess for this one.

And Fate/Zero, well, duh.

LagRin, Binbou and Horizon don't start until the 21st, so their first daily rankings would be out in the next 12 hours or so.

[catclan]

Accel World 5 (first press) and Sword Art Online 2 (complete version) are going to include a ticket for the AW x SAO Offline Meeting 3 event. The event is going to be explendid, since all the main cast of both series is going to be present. At least according to this article.

[something]

Originally Posted by catclan

Accel World 5 (first press) and Sword Art Online 2 (complete version) are going to include a ticket for the AW x SAO Offline Meeting 3 event. The event is going to be explendid, since all the main cast of both series is going to be present. At least according to this article.

Wonder if we might see Vol. 2 sell more than Vol. 1 for SAO then.

Well, probably not. I'm guessing most event tickets are only good for a couple thousand extra units, tops. They're more of a game-changer for shows that only sell a <10,000 to begin with. If SAO goes on to 30-40k, it might not be as noticeable. Especially if the ticket effect is going to be spread out across SAO and AW.



Also for those wondering, no full list for this week yet. Maybe nothing was added, or maybe it was just like... another week for Kokurikozaka BD or whatever. DVDBD wiki hasn't updated for this week yet though, maybe we'll see something there.

[William K]

Originally Posted by catclan

Accel World 5 (first press) and Sword Art Online 2 (complete version) are going to include a ticket for the AW x SAO Offline Meeting 3 event. The event is going to be explendid, since all the main cast of both series is going to be present. At least according to this article.

So, is Hidaka Rina going as Niko or Silica? :D

[something]

DVDBD Wiki has updated, but nobody on 2ch posted a final list for this week. I guess nothing was added, because all the new information on DVDBD Wiki looks like monthly rankings for previous volumes. Hell if I can figure out the exact period for the list, although this should be part August, part September based on release dates.

K-ON! Movie +924 LE BDs, total 163,547.

Nisemonogatari v4 +353 BDs, total 58,812. Current final average: 59,887. Getting closer to 60k.

Saki Achiga-hen v3 +260 BDs, total 5,206.

Eureka AO v3 +583 BDs, total 4,531.

HidaSketch x365 BD Box +288 BDs, total 4,623.
28) ¥*127.3m (*4,330 * ¥29,400) - Onegai Teacher
29) ¥*126.2m (*4,623 * ¥27,300) - Hidamari Sketch x365
30) ¥*125.9m (*4,441 * ¥28,350) - Ga Rei -Zero-

[ultimatemegax]

Something I've been thinking about lately is production costs and how much the one number we have (BD/DVD sales) can add towards it or even cover it. For this example, I thought it would be interesting to take a show that had a very low yen per episode cost on BD/DVD and see how much percentage it would cover of production. I'm sure a few posters on this forum would love this example, so I'm going to use Moretsu Space Pirates, which is a big outlier in our sales world.

To begin with, I'm going to make a few assumptions. The first one is that Moretsu is a show with average production costs. In 2010 an average show (as calculated by the Media Development Research Institute Inc.) totaled 11 million yen. To count for the additional costs in the year between 2010, I'm simply going to add 5% to it and sum it to 11,550,000 yen per episode. Moretsu ran for 26 episodes, giving a total production cost of 300,300,000 yen. This includes script, direction, production, and all animation costs. It does not include advertising nor disc manufacturing.

So we have a sum of 300 million yen to make up. How much do disc sales count towards it? The DVD version had 13 volumes and only two ranked at sums of 262 and 291 moved. I'll take the average at 277 sold per DVD (13). BDs were more accurate. We have totals of 6,472, 7,206, 7,264, 7,219, 7,175, 6,948, and 7,132. There were differences in prices per volume, so to make life simpler, I made a spreadsheet for calculations.

Total proceeds for DVD/BDs came out to be 335,632,400 yen. Though he used USD (idiotically), Justin Sevakis gives the percentage of net revenue per disc sold at 55%. That gives our revenue for Starchild at 184,597,820 yen.

Obviously Starchild isn't the only producer of the show, but that gives 61.5% of all production costs (disregarding costs for authoring/marketing/manufacturing). At worse, I would assume that would take away maybe 5% of costs, so that's still 56.5% of production that's counted via disc sales alone. This does not include any revenue given via music CDs, merchandise, novel sales, guidebook sales, etc. For a show that had a really low yen per episode count to still earn at least 55% of ALL show production costs is pretty good in my book.

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.

Edit: Draenor brought up a good point on Twitter. I neglected to talk about broadcast fees as they're variable (Pirates ran on 8 stations) and unknown for the most part. He brought up this translated chart by Momo (of Canned Dogs) which gave 20 million yen (presumably per episode) for timeslots back in 2003. Said chart refers to prime time timeslots. As noted in this article a 2 cour show would now run about 50-60million yen. Thanks to bloo for bringing this to my attention.

So let's add 55,000,000 yen for broadcasts. That would bring total costs to 355,300,000 yen. With those new costs, Pirates's disc revenue is down to 52% recovery of costs by disc sales alone (ignoring authoring/marketing/manufacturing). Still enough to cover half the costs of the show airing on TV. As mentioned below, the production company weren't planning to recoup a lot of costs by these discs (otherwise they wouldn't have put 4 episodes on a BD), so to still cover half your costs by them frees up funding for other things. It's easily a success (and why they're making a movie).

[something]

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.

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.

[ultimatemegax]

Originally Posted by something

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.

Yeah, people really forget that Moretsu is an outlier in how cheaply it was priced per disc. This was more to say "if you take out broadcast fees, Moretesu still makes half of its production costs via disc sales despite those low costs."

On the other hand, Hyouka, being a Kadokawa marathon, is an outlier in how expensive it is. Since KyoAni is a more notable studio, let's double their animation costs (but keep the same for seiyuu, scriptwriter, etc) and give a 1.5x multiplier for cost per episode. That would be 16,500,000 yen per episode and a total of 363,000,000 yen for production.

Sales for the first three volumes have held relatively consistent with ~8,000 on BD and ~2,000 on DVDs. Thankfully these are easier to calculate than Moretsu's proceeds. This gives us 56,000,000 yen per BD volume and 12,000,000 yen per DVD volume for a total of 68,000,000 yen per disc volume. Simply multiply that by 11 volume and we get total proceeds of 748,000,000 yen. Use the 55% figure from Sevakis and that's 411,400,000 yen earned from disc sales to Kadokawa. That's more than enough to cover any and all production costs to the show. Of course, this assumes sales will remain constant over the 11 volumes, which we have no guarantee of, but it's still high enough that small drops would be alright.

So in broad terms, disc sales alone are enough to support Hyouka even with the less than perfect measures we have. The other issue I neglected to calculate is the "top shows covering for lower shows" phenomenon. Kadokawa has had some low-selling shows lately. While this would be enough to cover costs for Hyouka, it wouldn't be enough to offset some other shows that didn't fully cover their costs. It is what it is though. Interesting to compare two shows that are on the opposite ends of the yen-per-episode measure.

Edit: even though Hyouka only ran 22 episodes, we have to add in the three weeks of Mirai Nikki that Kadokawa paid for on the new stations for a total of 25 weeks' timeslots. That still puts us at 55 million yen for broadcast costs and 418,000,000 yen total costs. Unfortuantely, that brings the show down to 98% recouping of costs by disc sales alone. Again, these shows are made by committee, so even though it won't recoup every single cost by BD/DVDs, it's still profitable.