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Supply, demand and reputation. This quote is the most telling to me: “I want to work in the anime industry for the rest of my life,” Mr. Akutsu, 29, said durin
by neura 6y ago
Supply, demand and reputation.
This quote is the most telling to me: “I want to work in the anime industry for the rest of my life,” Mr. Akutsu, 29, said during a telephone interview. But as he prepares to start a family, he feels intense financial pressure to leave. “I know it’s impossible to get married and to raise a child.”
He knows it's impossible to get what he wants in life, as an animator, but he still wants to do it for the rest of his life.
This isn't the case for most of the "jobs" that people are mentioning in the comments here, like people don't dream of being "cleaners" for the rest of their life, but there are other reasons why that might seem like their only reasonable choice. Lack of other marketable skills, probably being the most common. For cleaners, it doesn't even require that they can speak English, just that they can do the job they say the can.
My personal theory on anime, as that's the specific subject of the article, is that if there were a much lower supply of competent animators and the animations were more expensive to purchase, they wouldn't be so popular, people would find other things to do/watch, etc. Which really boils back down to supply and demand. It's not as simple as "people demand anime", but more something like "people are willing to pay $x for y hours of time watching anime", where services like Netflix (or more specific to the subject of anime, Crunchyroll) charge some small amount per month and give access to hundreds of seasons and full movies. If the masses had to purchase each season or episode individually, I'd suppose people would be watching a lot less or pirating a lot more.
- UnpossibleJim 6y agoIt may also have to do with why game companies in the US pay coders, testers and artists lower wages than non game companies. Game companies have "sold the dream" of working at a game company. Riding on a razor scooter, eating free snacks, wearing a hoodie while earning a subscale wage for the same work and longer hours during "crunch time". Executives and producers make the lions share because the above people's dreams are easily manipulated, not unlike the Anime industry in Japan.
- jonfw 6y agoIt's pretty disrespectful to game developers to imply that their 'dreams are easily manipulated' when they take less money to work in a field that's more interesting to them. This is a simple function of supply and demand, not naive developers too weak minded to resist executives. Developers interested in gaming are in high supply, while gaming pales economically in comparison to the fields where most of us work (presumably tech and fintech).
- salamanderman 6y agoWell, the executives, and the cult mentality within those companies, will tell the developers that they don't deserve more, and that they couldn't find better if they tried to leave, and that they are also easily replaceable. It is toxic manipulation. It would be fine, in some sense, if it were just supply and demand, but having seen the emotional breakdowns of a number of my friends, it is definitely more than that.
- jonfw 6y agoI can't imagine that the industry is so uniquely emotionally abusive that it would drive a disparity in earnings across such a large sample size. I'm sure that there are some bad apples though, and I'm sorry that your friends experienced that.
- salamanderman 6y agoWhen companies like EA do it, it sets a standard.
- UnpossibleJim 6y agoI didn't mean to imply that developers are weak minded (I hope not - it's the industry I have worked in for the last 20 years). In 2020 alone the video game industry took in 179+ billion dollars vs. the "tech" industry's 409+ billion, so I'm not sure that saying it "pales" in comparison is completely fair. Meanwhile the term "tech" is pretty broad, while games is a very narrow focus that might well be included in the "tech" sales... I'm unsure how that umbrella term is calculated. Either way, I certainly meant no disrespect.
- anfilt 6y agoYour average anime does not profit as much as these games from established game studios. At least when I last looked at the numbers for anime.
- CyberRage 6y agoAnime profits are actually quite low compared to other similar content.
- jariel 6y agoThis - but add 1) it's aspirational work which distorts some things (a lot of jobs are like this) and 2) probably lack of good Guild or Union. Markets actually rarely function very well on their own because participants often don't have enough information to make decent decisions or there are huge power asymmetries. An Artists Guild would, in the long run, probably make everyone better off.