http://kotaku.com/5873128/from-fantasy-to-fansubs-how-pirating-went-main...
Well, this is kind of shocking. I want to say I can't believe that a company that does what we do, but legitimately, is ceasing the production of their work.
But sadly, I think I can believe it. I have no doubt that piracy played a role in this unfortunate turn of events, but I think there's a lot of other factors that work against officially releasing Japanese products in America. I mean, the niche factor is one thing. Which is kind of ironic since I work in a library, and those kids love the manga. It's amazing when you consider all we had at that age was the Sailor Moon dub on TV and manga that read left to right. Crazy!
And to make my controversial claim for tonight, qualitywise, there's not really a good way for the official companies to compete. One of the nice things about fansubbing groups is, more of them means competition (usually causes people to do better work overall) and one can pick and choose a group depending on how it fits with their tastes. Choice is good? Not to mention the things that fansubs can come with like stylized subtitles, translator notes, etc. And bonus videos for related stuff like we do is always nice.
Basically, if you can get this for free, you've really got to step up your game if you want people to pay for your stuff. For example, it's pretty disappointing to hear that there's basic grammar mistakes in the new Sailor Moon manga. If you're the professionals, you have to put out professional work. If you follow the forums, occasionally I'll complain about what appears to me like sloppy translation, missing lines, or untranslated text lines. Or it just reads like it obviously hadn't had any QC work done.
For the most part, our policy is that we only sub stuff if there isn't a good English subtitle, Japanese audio version of it in America. Once it's ready for release on DVD, we'll pull it (regardless of the quality of the DVD subtitles, unfortunately).
It's a complicated relationship between us fans and the companies. We don't want any of those guys to go out of business because they're doing it the legal way, the way it's supposed to work ideally. It's kind of like how Batman needs the cops, there's got to be the guys who do things by the law. There'd be no need for fansubbing if we could get what we wanted from offically released DVDs/Blurays.
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