Strike Witches 2 “$50 an Episode”

and to support this post: the supply and demand law.

As bloob pointed out, the market for strike witches is pretty low. Because the are too few buyers, the dvd supply for SW must be low, and in consequence, the price must be high in order to receive some profit of it (to compensate the poor quantity of the potential buyers and the cost of production). The other way around, if the supplier starts making too much dvd's, sure they can sell them at a low cost, but because of the small market, the people won't buy all of them and thus, they keep stock, which in reallity, they are just loses.

By combining this law and the price elasticity, the companies can "predict" how much they have to produce with a certain price tag in order to produce big fatty revenues.

This also explains why limited editions and luxury stuff are highly priced.

Ah but you forget supply and demand and price equilibrium, at a certain point the price goes way past the price equilibrium and even less people are willing to pay that price thus the demand goes down. Assuming the consumer is rational, and all consumers are rational right? Right?.

So you are telling me that you would pay 70 USD for thirty minutes of entertainment. Ever heard of the Cost Benefit Analysis skill use it some time it might help.

These prices are ridiculous, any sane person would not purchase 30 minutes of entertainment for 70 bucks that is irrational.

Yeah, but let me tell you that THE COMPANIES ALWAYS PRODUCE IN THE EQUILIBRIUM POINT. The explanation above is just why the price tag on this particular DVD. You are just describing the what if situation. That's why you need the price elasticity in order to see if you are really working near or on the equilibrium point.

Now let me remind you that we are talking about OTAKUS..not rational people. They are willing to pay the price of those DVD's, that's why they are selling them at that price. And yeah I know the cost of opportunity, but, think about it: What may be discarding in order to buy those dvd's???. ANOTHER ANIME-MANGA-RELATED ITEM! so, in the end, their cost of opportunity only relies on what they want first, not on necesities.

Of course I could be completely wrong, but otakus are a whole damn mysterious world. I wonder if I can make this the central topic of my economics thesis?

@12:38 Anon

You seem to be under the assumption that the people buying this are soley buying it for that 46 minutes (40 discluding OP and ED) of animation.

There's simply the fact of owning the discs - there is also the extras that come with limited edition versions.

You also seem to be under the assumption that this niche market in Japan is sane. Who said this was the case?

I don't buy anime to watch it, I've already done that. The only reasons I purchase it is to put some money into the pockets of the producers for creating something I enjoy, and for the collectability factor. It's basically a donation anyways, so the, "expense", is rather irrelevant.

Bloo, that's just random predictions, not any better than fortune tellers and astrologists. Your numbers are not any more creditable than a set of numbers derived from a RNG.

Haha, very true. Sure, I pulled the numbers out of my ass, but I wasn't about to spend hours of my time researching the statistics and doing the actual calculations involved for a post on a place like Sankaku.

This, however, doesn't change the fact that price elasticity is very real (although much more complicated than my crude explanation made it out to be), and that it applies to the anime market very much in the way I described it. Late-night anime just doesn't have the millions strong market that people seem to think it does, even in Japan. This means the studios and companies involved have to do anything and everything they can in order to turn a profit. And the current business model seems to be working for them, even if it is as backwards as many anime fans in the R1 market seem to think it is.

@bloo
The fact they are using this business model does not mean it's working as they think it is. It just means they aren't willing to seek out alternatives.

So Strike Witches is expensive because it sucks?

Because that would seem to be what posts are hinting at.