GHD, the parent company of Gonzo anime studio, has adopted an 'open pricing' policy for anime fans who want to download brand-new episodes of its Tower of Druaga: Aegis of Uruk and Blassreiter animes.
According to film site ICv2, Interweb-savvy anime fans will be able to decide how much they want to pay when downloading episodes of the upcoming series from the Crunchyroll website. Each series features 13 episodes.
As mentioned before, Gonzo will post English-subtitled versions of both Tower of Druaga: Aegis of Uruk and Blassreiter on Crunchyroll the same day the original episodes air on Japanese TV. For obvious reasons, the Crunchyroll downloads won't be available in Japan.
The anime company won't give a suggested retail price for the episodes, but it's likely they'll make about $1.99 per episode. That's the same price that iTunes currently charges to download TV content from their site.
Gonzo Takes Cue From Radiohead
Gonzo's strategy is essentially identical to the marketing plan used by U.K. art rock band Radiohead when promoting their latest CD, In Rainbows. For a limited time, prior to In Rainbow's release, the group offered the songs on their website for a pay-what-you-can fee. Fans eventually downloaded the album around 1.2 million times. Radiohead hasn't admitted how much fans paid on average to download their CD, but experts guessed that the average price was $5. In interviews, fans claimed that they had paid even more to download their beloved band's CD.
On the plus side, offering the songs for free download didn't hurt Radiohead's new CD when it eventually hit stores. In Rainbows debuted at #1 on the music charts, which implies that fans who downloaded the CD also bought the disc when it came out in stores.
Gonzo hopes this strategy will address the biggest problem facing anime producers (and the reason why fansubbing of anime has become so commonplace): the massive time lag between when a series airs in Japan and when it becomes available in international markets. In some cases, it took almost a year after an anime debuted on Japanese TV before a DVD of the series was available in international markets.
The reasons behind the lag (translating the script, casting voice actors, modifying the animation to accommodate the new script) didn't hold much water with technologically-advanced anime fans who could stream amateur-overdubbed episodes of various animes for free through various BitTorrent sites.
It's likely that Gonzo will eventually make DVD box sets for both Tower of Druaga and Blassreiter available for sale, with foreign-language dubs and behind-the-scenes extras and featurettes. Will the pay-what-you-can downloads hurt eventual DVD sales of these animes, or will fans appreciate the goodwill gesture and pick up Tower of Druaga and Blassreiter when they hit stores?
As the old saying goes: stay tuned.
