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A likelier hypothesis is that for every One Punch Man, there's a dozen mediocre series that flop and need to be carried by the profits of the series that succeed, analogous to the games industry and Hollywood movies, which are also hit-driven entertainment.

I'd hazard a guess that the industry is Power Law distributed, as opposed to Gaussian distributed. Power Laws take a few names depending on your field, but some common ones are Pareto distributions, winner-take-all, or fat-headed/long-tailed. The underlying math is the same though. These distributions are also quite wide ranging, everything from tax bills to the size of asteroids is Power Law distributed.

If anyone knows the 'mechanism' as to why so many disparate measures end up as Power Laws, I'd love to read more on it, as I;m sure other HNers would too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barabási–Albert_model

I think there are multiple hypothesized reasons, but I haven't seen any numerical figures so it's hard to confirm how impactful each is:

- Anime production committees (https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2017/05/02/what-is-an-animes-pr...) take a large portion of the profit from a show, and studios often see very little (they're often not on the production committees).

- If the studio doesn't own the IP, they'll likely have to pay a hefty amount for it.

- There's not much actual revenue from anime: historically studios have tried to monetize via extraordinarily expensive DVDs of the episodes (such that only die-hard fans would buy them), and merchandise, but apparently the studios don't even get all of the revenue from these sources. Streaming is becoming more popular but I'm not sure how much revenue Crunchyroll/Netflix/etc. shares with the studios.

- Anime is often seen as an advertisement for the original source material (usually manga), so there's less incentive for certain parties on the production committee to monetize.

For a counter example of why American-based anime studios aren't popping up, an ostensibly American production, The Simpsons, has had Korean studios in the credits for the major parts of animation from the very first episode, same with Avatar: The Last Airbender. If you watch The Simpsons on DVD, in one of the season one specials Groenig talks about getting the animatics from Korea and having to go back and forth with the Korean studio until they captured the look that was desired. The producers will outsource to get the cheapest production. IIRC American animation in all media was dwindling at this point because studios didn't want to pay Americans to do the animation. The current Japanese studio doing Attack on Titan is outsourcing components to Vietnamese and Chinese studios probably for the same sort of reason.

Outsourcing of at least parts of the production is essentially totally widespread, in both the US and Japan, as far as I'm aware.

You shouldn't think of the anime in isolation. They are multimedia franchises. The anime is there to sell the manga, the figures, the light novel, etc.

It's probably widely why Pokémon is so successful. It's not about the show, it's about selling all the other products. The show is one big advertisement. And it's good, too.

Or at least it was, when I was a kid watching it on a CRT. I have no idea what it's like now.

Still there.

Also Gundam. The whole franchise was initially a way to promote model kit :D

Gundam has some really amazing animation though. So many beautifully animated battles! I do spot some reuse here and there when I rewatch but still. It never struck me as a mere advertisement for merchandise.

That reminds me of how excited I got when I got a pokedex and workable pokeballs from Santa. It's been a long time since there were only 150 Pokemon. I wonder if they're even still using pokedexes in the series.

I also got a couple of digivices from Digimon, from the second and fourth(?) season. I remember they had story modes and contacts at the top for multiplayer gameplay, as well as a walking sensor for story advancement which you could cheat by just shaking the device for hours. My friend with whom I battled it out never had a chance because he actually tried walking the distance. That's until he noticed the gap between our digimon was getting too big despite all the walking he did, and I ended up telling him the trick. Quite a facepalm moment right there. Those were neat little devices for our ages back then.

> I wonder if they're even still using pokedexes in the series.

The pokedex itself is a pokemon now. It hosts a Rotom.

My friend was the one with the working pokedex and boy was I jealous. Lots of Pokemon nostalgia thinking about all the gizmos and toys I bought, trading cards, video games, marbles, action figures, you name it.

Fun time to be nostalgic since tomorrow is the 25th anniversary too.

The most recognizables ones are, but I'd wager most anime has no such ambitions.

you’d be wrong, as far as i’m aware. almost all anime in the current system is an adaptation of a manga or LN - the anime comes at the end of the multimedia expansion project.

Or an adaptation of a game; the ones with multiple endings even sometimes receive multiple anime projects to show off aspects of the different paths and different endings.

Adapted from a manga? Sure I guess. And most movies are adapted from books. I'm not sure that qualifies as a multimedia economic model. Is the anime really there to increase sales of the manga? Or is it supposed to be profitable on its own?

I would, perhaps naively, Assume the latter.

Very true pointing out the multi in multimedia. Just like musicians, they make a big chunk of their earnings off of merchandise and concerts and not just record sales and royalties.

Actually, the wast majority of musicians make nothing at all. Even fairly popular bands don’t.

“That you’d better be in it for the music, because you sure as hell aren’t going to make any money from being in a metal band, certainly in this day and age.”

https://www.loudersound.com/features/peripherys-spencer-sote...

JC Staff, a "bottom of the barrel studio"? Which universe? (and I say that as someone who personally really doesn't like the studio)

>If so, that incentive structure needs to change if you want to increase the quality of the anime.

The incentive is that if the anime is low quality, people won't watch anymore.

How does that affect the executive making that decision, who is already wealthy? It's not like executives are ever punished for poorly running a company.

>How does that affect the executive making that decision, who is already wealthy

But your other comment[1] seems to suggest that executives love money and want to make more, so they would definitely be affected by that decision.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26275488

>It's not like executives are ever punished for poorly running a company.

Their bonuses are linked to company performance, and they can be fired just like any other job.

>Their bonuses are linked to company performance, and they can be fired just like any other job.

So they get fired, then what? They get hired by another company for more money because now they have experience. That's what I mean about not being punished.

No executive ever ends up destitute and on the streets. We should strive for all workers to have the same safety net as executives.

> Their bonuses are linked to company performance

As history shows this isn't really true.

> Are the profits not shared with the animators?

Doesn't matter. Even if profit sharing were implemented, the boss gets to choose the percentage of the profit that animators get. Due to supply and demand, they'll still get the short end of the stick. Definitely better than nothing, but the problem will continue to exist in another form.

https://deadline.com/2021/02/avatar-the-last-airbender-franc...

In the traditional model, the anime is marketing material for the franchise. Money is in figures, merchandise, and manga, which usually all existed before the anime was created. Generally only established studios with plenty of funds do original (not first portrayed in another medium) anime.

OPM went to JC for S2 because the very expensive S1 from Madhouse had already satisfied the goal of bringing tons of new fans to the franchise.

This is changing though, as anime is getting cheaper to produce and international viewers are increasing.

> OPM went to JC for S2 because the very expensive S1 from Madhouse had already satisfied the goal of bringing tons of new fans to the franchise.

IIRC it was also scheduling. Madhouse was booked up for a while.

I don't think the article makes this clear but animators are the people who are responsible to create the frames between key frames designed by the actual designers. This also means that the person described in the article is competing with studios in China and other asian countries that do the same work for very cheap prices because they have access to cheap labor.