The cynical side of me thinks that the government is just trying to appear to be doing something, although the article did mention things like
To address the shortage of anime creators, the government will improve working conditions at production studios. It will also establish a certification mark that will be awarded to anime produced under appropriate working conditions.
Not sure how effective they will be, but at least good that they acknowledge there is a working condition problem.
12 hour tit4tat work weeks, paternal & maternal leave, forced paid vacation, healthcare for all, and direct dividends‽ Sign me up!
spoiler
😭😭😭
Yet again, the Japanese displaying a clear misunderstanding or willful ignorance of the positive effects of piracy on business and consumption.
If you target piracy, your product becomes harder to get or find, discoverability goes down especially among people that cannot afford to buy it, then you lose even more money since people that could maybe afford only some avanues of paying for your product are now priced out of the products entirely. This happens all the time.
The GameCube is my favorite example. It was hard to pirate games for. Unsurprisingly, the console sold really, really badly in South East Asia. At the same time, PS2 and Xbox both used normal disks, and consequently, since games could be pirated easily, those consoles outsold the GameCube in South East Asia. Nintendo was a victim of their own hubris, their attempt to reduce piracy literally meant they got outsold by their competitors. This is not a unique experience, this continues to happen again and again.
Thank you for expressing something I wanted to say with farther derision. In order to increase tourism and foreign investment, isolation and anticounterfeiting go against the purpose of said incomes. I hate this bourgeoisie government soooo much.
Weren’t PS2 and Xbox also much more powerful hardware?
I believe the PS2 hardware was weaker than the GameCube on a technical level, but the Xbox was absolutely way more powerful. Nintendo should have had the home field advantage though, given the popularity of the Nintendo brand. The GameCube should have sold well, especially since it was cheaper than a PS2 or Xbox, but it didn’t.
Knowing Nintendo, they’re fine with it. They would rather go bankrupt than let people interact with them outside the officially-allowed methods.
The main difference is counterfeiting as we understand it (physical goods) usually involves selling for profit. At least more than piracy. And if you ask me, companies frown upon piracy because they see it in the lens of digital counterfeiting. Yet in piracy’s case, it usually involves no profit.
Actually licencing shit in other countries might also help … “counterfeit” is often the only option.
