Is this as true as it once was? It seems most of the old trackers are offline or dead now. I’d guess because of the success of streaming services finally meeting the market demand. It’s also possible I’m just old and out of the loop now.
Also if you happen to speak a language outside the big Western languages, then it's all trivial and a simple search anywhere will yield even better than above.
[1] - https://torrentfreak.com/images/Notorious_Markets_Submission...
10+ years ago you could get a well seeded torrent anything by googling "anything+torrent". Nowadays you can still get anything but you have to be way more tech savvy and have to break out of your comfort zone. This could mean invite only sites,Russian speaking sites,Fiddling with baidu download scripts etc.
Seeing how much activity peak mininova had[0] compared to the public tracker offerings of today makes me a bit sad. There are still great places to leech some warez but "the more the merrier" is always true for p2p based sharing :^)
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090114215808/http://www.minino...
Everything is in private communities now. Almost all the content you can think exists on usenet, but all the good indexers are invite-only (and often pay to play. My usenet subscription + the yearly fees to various private trackers was just a little less expensive than Netflix (up until the most recent price hike).
Alternatively, invite-only/private torrent trackers are as good/better than the old days.
Way harder for regular folks to break into the scene, but it's far more "professional"(?) now
Of course, you’ll need to wait for me to open up my client every couple weeks, but you’ll get it eventually.
The DVD/Blu-Ray season sets cost 85-90€ each(!!!) for 13 (~20-22 minutes) episodes per season. That price to me is simply unacceptable, since that's more for one season than the entirety of series like "Friends" or "House, M.D.", either of which provide vastly more content and are WAY more popular than any anime.
As it stands now, I'll probably just wait until the last six episodes of this season become available then use the free "test period" for the "aniverse" channel on Prime Video, on which I arbitrarily can't watch 1080p HD because I have the absolute audacity of not using Windows (a problem which downloads from certain ... 3rd-party sites do not share).
Which is why they can get away with charging less per copy.
There are potentially many market equilibria-- selling 200 copies at $100, 400 copies at $50, or 1000 copies at $10.
If they switched to a bargain-priced model, you enable tsundoku-style purchasing-- put up a big display of "here's a hundred back-catalog series, 13 episodes on two DVDs in a flimsy cardboard sleeve for 1000 yen each", people would be willing to take much more risk on buying them.
Arguably, there's a lot of information being lost because they only see purchase data of people hardcore enough to pay the current high prices. (I wonder if to an extent this impacts anime's tendency for fanservice choices-- they're chasing an artificially narrow market)
There's still the opportunity for price-discrimination for fanatics with limited editions with better packaging, extra content, and feelies.
It's interesting to contrast that the price of manga was almost impossibly low. In Japan, (at least it used to be) like 1/3 the price as in the US for a 200-page volume, and the omnibus magazines were pretty cheap, which made it more amenable to risk-taking purchases.
Anime though is often way way cheaper in the US although that may have changed since Sony started buying up most of the players. Although this does have some downsides as US releases are usually hard-coded to have English subs on when using Japanese voices, no Japanese subs etc. to try and discourage reverse importing. But yeah easily a 5th the cost of collecting the whole set from the Japanese releases. Only Aniplex (who Sony owned) would do the garbage $80 for 2-3 episodes in US.
Anybody with any insights into Japanese culture/business? I've always wondered why this was, or if it's something as simple as inertia.