Japanese Producer Terminates FUNimation's Simulcast of Fractale

There are two very important reasons for this.
1. double the translations means double the translating budget.
2. "There is[sic]...only stupid people."

Spending more money for better quality is all well and good, but if the return in quality isn't noticeable by the people who watch it, then the producers can't make that money back. Also, most people tend to prefer sticking with the first sub that they enjoy, rather then reading and comparing two different translations.

@dragon8writer

A good translation is often made with the intent on bridging the cultural gap as well, otherwise you end up with disjointed crap that doesn't convey anything.

That is, if their target is to broaden the market share they have, they will always have to consider much of the audience don't know what the hell honorifics are, why people's names are spelled with the last name first and so on and so forth.

Now, being on the side of the fence that also enjoys this little bits of the original I am still clueless why they simply don't add two subtitle tracks. It's not like DVD/BD only allow one subtitle or anything.

My problem with official subs is that they often seem to assume the watchers are idiots. They condense the speech, translate in ways that are clearly made to just make things easier on American audiences (never mind accuracy) and just basically create a worse alternative, in most cases...

Sometimes they're good, but often they just ANNOY me.

(At least with the manga, you can't TELL if they're treating you like an idiot. :P )

Personally I don' give a shit about piracy. Hell when I used to make music I gave two options, you could buy the mp3, or download it. It would be pirated anyways. (Actually it wouldn't ever be downloaded at all with how horrible my music was but that's off topic)

Hell yes I pirate things. Do I feel any remorse? No. I would never buy half this stuff anyways. If I really like it I will buy it though, Like Haruhi. I bought all the novels translated so far, the manga, the anime, some plushies ect. ect. Of course that's the anime I extreme fan boy over but my point is still here. Am I entitled to anything I download? Nope. I see that and I still don't care.

Since piracy won't go away and being a goody two shoes will only screw myself I see no point in caring in the least. I'm not hurting anyone either; if I stole a car, someone would be out a car. If I download an anime, I really don't see anyone losing out.


"You wouldn't download a car"
Hell yes I would if I could.


Also I wouldn't yell at Funi about only releasing to the US. Bandwidth is expensive as it is, international it just become pointless, chance are you'll spend more money on bandwidth than you'll get. Just sayin' yo.

"Now that there is the bullshit excuse is "A JURDP A DUURP ISTH NOT HIGH ENOUGH QUALITY""

Well, it's NOT high quality enough.

Funi: 360p, hardsubs, banding and color issues, ugly watermark.
Fansubs: 720p, softsubs, subbed OP/ED, excellent video/audio quality.

The free version is better looking then the paid version. You'd have to be an idiot to pay for something of LESS quality then you can obtain for free.
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/22050

I would say when I have purchased literally 80% of the video games I have pirated on the DS...then yes. Me pirating causes sales for the companies. The only ones I don't buy are niche games I can't get my hands on. Since me pirating something and me buying a game off ebay are putting the exact same amount of money into the developers pockets. Zero.
Or games that aren't released in North America.

===

But anyways.
This is sort of bullshit.
I wanted to watch this. I watch on Crunchyroll and Funi and official youtube chanels whenever I get the chance. Now....I can't.
So I will pirate it.
And i'm pirating it because I can't watch it legally.
Because they said you can't have the show unless you stop pirating.
But I can't watch the show without pirating because you took it away companies....
what do.
;-;

EDIT:
I love how so many people can't put their actions where their asses are. Years ago the excuse was there was no legal way to watch it. Now that there is the bullshit excuse is "A JURDP A DUURP ISTH NOT HIGH ENOUGH QUALITY"

I love pirates who can't back up their bite and try and hide behind excuses for their thievery.

EDIT EDIT:

No rehab center has ever closed saying there are to many drug addicts and that when drug addiction goes down they will reopen.
-gonk-

If the fractale commitee was the government, would I see an initiative to completely stop police funding because the police force was unable to stop all the crime in the world?

Probably.



I think you need to learn the difference between a company in Japan and the entire country of Japan.

You could say that pirates never had the intention of buying it in the first place which would mean they lost nothing and you could also argue that pirating games, anime, w/e can help sales by letting people "test" it first. (The last bit is true when it comes to anime and games that never get released in America like the Touhou games)




Either way this is just stupid and will not stop pirates from getting what they want. :)

Look the conditions to be fulfilled in order to solve all this are impossible so fan subbers are winners in all this regardless.

BTW, this really sucks of Japan.

I know, right? Brilliant plan. I was actually streaming it off YouTube on my television but I guess I'll just force my lazy self to download it.

Good job thinking this through, Japan. Not only am I still watching the exact same fansubs as before, which come out right after the show airs and in better quality, but I'm sure quite a few of the people who cared enough to watch Funi's official stream instead are now watching those fansubs, too. Thanks for supporting fansubbing, Japan.

@RyuujinRagnar

Please people, stop making claims without ANYTHING to back it up! It's beyond ridiculous.

No, anime would NOT make a cent here in Brazil, I reside here and I know full well how our market works.

Anime released locally can barely make it even, and I am talking about fully dubbed/localized Ghibli titles. We also have the uncut boxsets for Naruto (I actually am yet to confirm this) and a few others, but guess what, they don't sell for crap.

Entertainment in developing countries such as ours is beyond risky, it's just plainly stupid most of the time. Look at Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony... with 80 ~ 90% piracy who on it's right mind would make a bet to bring anything over? We just got PS3 for Christmas 2010! X-Box Live took how many years again to be worth bringing over? Blizzard just started properly dealing with pt-br market with Starcraft II... before that all we had were half assed dub-only translation were they didn't even bother to translate the expansions.

And I am using video games as a sample because they are far more mainstream than anime is. The reason why we get censored stuff is simply because what we do get is "second hand market". Our deals mostly come trough US companies, thus our "raws" are butchered from conception.

The titles we get ported straight from Japan with PlayArte, Sony and I think one or two other are the real deal. I have all Ghibli national releases, and I can attest the DVD9 ones (for some reason I have some funky Howl's Moving Castle dvd5 release ¬¬) have a fair quality... I did compare some with their R2 counterparts and there is indeed a quality drop, but it's still nice to see them coming here with competitive prices (around 15US$ a movie).

We had a thing going a couple of years back with Saint Seya (they tried to make a fuss with similar shows and ended up backfiring on them) and currently the manga publishing is making a nice push with JBC, Panini and NewPOP (currently I buy 3 series from them and all are properly translated AND uncensored... even if a bit pricey) but no, I don't see a sustainable market for anime in Brazil currently. I did bother to go to "animeFriends" this year and it's mostly a Narutard event with heavy focus on cosplay, it's NOT an anime con.... yet.... sadly. I can't talk much about the fansub scene since I droped out of it a couple of years back in favour of the English one (most of national fansubbers just suck), but I did follow Shakaw releases and they struggled to sustain a swam a couple of weeks after release, and that for Naruto episodes.

As far as US and EU go, I am fairly sure it's mostly copyright/legal issues that put them behind. It's still a niche market, but they certainly could grasp to a wider audience if they REALLY put some pressure... I think it's just in their nature not to take risks and/or open up to globalization.

I've seen some anime steaming sites get hit hard by FUNimation with removal requests, and some of the sites ended up putting the anime back up after removing them at first. My guess is that they use a foreign server now, but I'm not sure.

@Jigero





You make some pretty broad claims. I would love to see some backbone to those. I for one don't like to assume things I don't have hard facts to lean my assumptions on, so I would like to hear yours.

I can give in on your stance on BlueRay, but the way you interpret it is flawed. The raw numbers are slightly better than what they were a year ago, but that is not because the market is substantially growing like you seem to argue.

I can also give in on the quality of the streams. The truth is fasubbers are their market competitors, and as long as they don't offer an equally good or better alternative they have no ground to base their claims against piracy.

All that aside, I think it's still too soon for anyone to be taking sides. We simply do not know how to deal with copyright in our current paradigm involving the internet. Instead of either siding with "the evil corporates" or the "freedom fighters of the internet" I would rather remain ambiguous about the subject at least until we can paint the whole picture. The music "issue" has been going for the most part of the last decade and we are still far from reaching some sort of mid term.

The quality of simucast is fast but just horrible... I never liked this idea from the beginning, glad it's suspended... businesses goes back to fansubbers

Not a big loss, besides streaming quality sucks major balls and there's not even 1 website streaming it for my country in the end fansubs or DVD releases subbed in various languages are of much higher quality then Funi and Crunchy ever will be. It's pretty hard getting anything legal in my country as dubs are lame and if I do find something big chance it is subbed in french which is even lamer. I'll keep watching my ripped fansubs thank you very much untill streaming website's can make it global and same quality as the fansubbers.

It took me a while to get what Japan really want to happen. I mean, lolwut? *scratches head* I'm not from the US though so I can't stream legally and there's no way I can support Funi-Fractale right now.

Typical Jigero, thinking the big bad businesses don't know shit.



And that has anything to do with my post how? All I remember posting what that piracy sends people to jail in Japan.

Shame on you lot. I mean, none of you even watch FUNi's "free" legal stream. Most MAL users were going to download a fansub release anywho. No use pulling the "oh shit, now I guess I have to pirate" move, because it's nonsensical.



Herp you can't prove you would have made the money anyway so my argument makes perfect sense derp.

Everyone knows your stance on this Jigero. Now go back to whatever you do.

And you missed the point, They took away the only legal way of viewing, despite fansubbers still ripping the 720p Japanese release. So instead of having how ever minor profit they where making off the Funi stream they are making nothing now, nor did they hedge illegal file sharing even half a percent. It was entirely pointless and actually hurt them instead of helped them by pulling it.




Sure if you ignore the fact that Japanese blu-ray sales raise exponentially every year.

Piracy doesn't cause losses, it just causes less profit. instead of making 2,000,000 that year they only make 1,800,000 that year. So they get all the bitchy about that 200,000 that didn't make that year even though they can't even prove they would have made that money regardless of piracy.