Comment by chocolatkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chocolatkey | Hacker News Reader

I actually happen to work in this industry, and this is definitely correct. We've actually shifting towards licensing more webtoons than manga, because in the digital world, manga doesn't sell very well (unless you're dealing with Shounen Jump content which is all taken anyway), and webtoons have a huge growing popularity. It's kind of funny when I look at our platform's stats, how the mobile audience is mainly webtoons and the web audience is mainly manga (and much smaller).

The Japanese publishers definitely know this is a huge issue imo, unlike what this article says. It's hard not to when a Korean app combining webtoons and manga (Piccoma) has dominated the Japanese Play/Apple store's rankings and shown the publishers the potential of the market. It's kind of humiliating honestly. That's why they're trying to get in on the business by spinning up webtoon studios and doing manga -> webtoon conversions. Some are doing OK, most aren't.

Note for anyone interested in entering the market: Korean webtoons currently consist mostly of a duopoly between Kakao and Naver. When a good webtoon is produced, the studio usually has to sign an exclusive contract with one of them, and they both have either launched platforms in all popular foreign languages, or have bought out the biggest ones, so squeezing in is not very easy. On that note, I'm very surprised this article doesn't mention the alternative: Chinese webtoons. They're pretty huge as well. Another fun fact: It's kind of hard to find "webtoons" if that's what you're looking for, because Naver tries to scare anyone who wants to use that word (they also own the "Webtoon" platform, which is larger than any other in existence in the foreign market). You'll see stuff like "Smarttoon", "Mangatoon", "Vericomix", and other made-up terms that really just mean webtoon.

You used the word humiliating, which I found so strong I had to check the numbers myself. They are every bit as shocking as you made it sound. Yet another area of Japanese culture that Korea/China has been able to just take minor steps to digitally modernize, and in turn exponentially improve it's globally mass-marketability. Korea did it in music, China (and to some extent Korea) has done it in gaming, and it really does seem like Korea/China have done it in comics. Thanks for the tip, info I've gained from the last few hours of reading due to your comment will hit the pages of at least a handful of my slide decks next year.

Looking at what has actually come out of that push for "global mass-marketability", which is to say a lot of huge money machines and not a lot of art, the worst thing that could result from this is Japanese publishers trying to replicate this, as basically none of the internationally successful Japanese auteur creators would have had their works greenlit if they'd had to pass some global mass-marketability criteria.

Yeah I agree with you on all the way down to the very foundational fiber of my being. Luckily though Japanese publishers will at most just add webtoons on top of their current operations and that will be that. Jpop still more or less exactly the same as before YG and Hybe made Idols universal, Japanese games are for the most part still as unique as the were before Mihoyo and Smilegate changed the ARPG industry landscape. I sincerely believe that Shueisha, Kodansha, and the broader manga sphere will remain largely the same as we move in to the future.

I work in Media merchant banking (Investment Banking + Private Equity), so what webtoons will possibly allow me to do is show Western-raised or older generation generation capital holders another vector by which Asian literary media is a worthwhile investment. I'd walk a mile through broken glass to funnel 100 mil USD into the manga industry, but obviously the amount of opportunities that arise where I can attempt to push the needle in that direction is slim. Webtoons might be a viable vector in some cases where manga isnt financially, and I've seen enough relatively impressive webtoons to feel that money is better spent there than most other places.

Are you following what's going on with these online serial novel platforms like Qidian and Japanese equivalents? They seem to be the wellspring for a lot of the IP recently but penetration to the west still seems kinda low.

It's really interesting how authors use these kind of narrative dark patterns to keep readers buying chapters and the effect that has on the story they end up writing.

Yeah I've been hip to the web novel stuff for the last 5 years. The stuff has an absolute death grip on Chinese fiction, and some of it is really quite spectacular. On a whole I consider it to be a very Chinese development, but some titles get surprisingly large global readership. It's a clever modernization of the Japanese light novel industrial complex, but I think fictional literature as leisure is just not practiced enough in the West for web novels to ever have a similar type of impact.

Like Shousetsuka ni Narou? I've actually seen novels originating there in an English small-town HMV with surprisingly prominent placement, and a similar amount of shelf space as Marvel and DC comics combined. Listed as "Manga Novels" for some reason. There were a few xianxia-looking titles there, but I don't follow Chinese media so I don't know whether they were originally web novels or not.

Given that HMV is a huge chain that mainly sells records and BluRays, they'd have to be pretty established to be there and not in a specialist bookseller or comic shop.

On the last paragraph: With how frequently audiences end up being dissatisfied with the endings of popular serialised works, I'm quite close to just giving up on serialised fiction entirely, or at the very least only considering reading or watching something once it's over. Whether it's manga (good anime adaptations avoid this problem, bad ones exacerbate it with filler arcs), US seasonal TV, live-service games, or novels that have "Part 1" in their title, the problems all end up being the same. Either it's unpopular and has to wrap up in less time than planned, resulting in aborted arcs and contrived endings, or it's popular and the author decides (or is encouraged by big piles of money) to drag it out beyond the original planned run, resulting in poor pacing, retcons, dubious plot twists, re-treading old narrative points and filler arcs.

    basically none of the internationally successful 
    Japanese auteur creators would have had their works 
    greenlit if they'd had to pass some global 
    mass-marketability criteria

Agreed. Japan has produced a lot of properties with global appeal, but I can't think of any successful properties that were intentionally designed with the international market in mind.

The domestic Japanese manga scene is so competitive and so crowded... creators basically push themselves to within an inch of their lives trying to make it in that market, appealing to the home audience. Most don't succeed. The anime market is largely fueled by manga properties, so this is largely true for that industry as well.

The game market is somewhat similar, aside from the (absolutely enormous, but fairly singular) exception that is Nintendo.

I'm actually quite thankful for this. Despite much of it being readily available in a translated form for American audiences... maybe I'm fooling myself but it feels like Japanese pop culture has remained relatively undiluted.

Sonic the Hedgehog seems to designed for international market and not much popular in Japan.

I'd question if Sonic the Hedgehog was 'designed' at all. The scattershot approach to media and branding they've taken over the decades feels largely reactive.

His initial design has been pretty well chronicled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(character)...

It has definitely been an uneven and chaotic ride compared to Nintendo's handling of the Mario franchise, though. Scattershot, indeed.

It's an interesting contrast in other ways too.

Mario is something close to a blank slate with no real personality. He's basically just a "seal of quality" - if it's a Mario game, you know it's a game that has received Nintendo's full attention to quality and is going to be accessible to all ages. You don't ever really "like" Mario. You like Mario games.

Whereas Sonic is an actual character, albeit one that has been developed in wildly inconsistent ways.

What's really baffling to me is the uneven quality of Sonic games. There have been some downright bad ones. You'd think Sega would have viewed him as their crown jewel. But there are a lot of times it felt like they were cranking out bad Sonic games just to stay afloat or something. It is almost impossible to think of Nintendo releasing bad Mario games.

That's a good one. He was specifically designed in large part to appeal to American audiences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(character)...

As another HNer quipped, though: Sega's uneven stewardship of that franchise sometimes makes you wonder if there's any plan at all!

I've had a somewhat similar feeling with the American-developed offshoot of Stable Diffusion by NovelAI suddenly granting everyone the ability to churn out hundreds of pieces of fanart of Japanese IPs with little effort. I also remember reading a Japanese tweet that spoke of the same sentiment related to foreign countries adapting parts of Japan's culture (Genshin Impact being one example).

It's odd to suggest that Chinese games have eclipsed Japanese games in global mass-marketability. The complete and exhaustive list of games developed in China with global mass-market appeal: Genshin Impact. Meanwhile, in Japan's corner: gestures broadly at half the gaming industry. Are you including games like LoL or PUBG that were merely purchased by Chinese companies after becoming popular?

I'm yet to find something I'd like to read. I'm a big fan of slice of life elements mixed with fantasy and so far haven't found anything on the Korean and Chinese side that interests me. It's all power fantasy or soap operas. There doesn't seem to be none in between.

Talking about Sousou no Frieren and Houseki no Kuni. Creative comedy like Dungeon Meshi. So far I'm yet to find some webtoon that interests me.

I'm definitely not disagreeing that manga can be more interesting. I'm mainly a manga reader myself, and find many more interesting series covering esoteric topics. But it's about appealing to the largest possible audience, and the reality (and I say this once again based on my and other's stats) is that currently, the male audience wants some variation of the escapist video game or medieval Europe setting with the weak-to-overpowered protagonist using swords and sorcery, probably reincarnated or time-traveling from the life of a loser/weakling. The female audience wants a medieval Europe setting where the protagonist (probably originally an average-looking female in our world or theirs) is either a "villainess", maid, knight or someone other position that makes is possible to have a reverse harem of hot guys with a sadistic or cold-to-warm (tsundere) personality. Those setups are being endlessly mined for new series, just adjust the variables and bam, new series.

I do think that there are also some unique webtoons out there, you're just going to have trouble finding them because they're buried beneath the huge pile of more widespread popular series, which is what all the artists with talent are focusing on (Korean webtoon studios, and the industry as a whole, is a lot more profit-driven). It's also easy to judge a webtoon by its cover and think "oh yet another OP protagonist". Try some out, maybe you'll like one!

Manga is more culturally developed, but it's just that it makes less money

> I'm a big fan of slice of life elements mixed with fantasy and so far haven't found anything on the Korean ... . It's all power fantasy or soap operas.

As a Korean who used to read webtoon since the very start, this is what I feel these days too. There are more webtoons than ever, but they are all so generic.

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