But it's a self-perpetuating death loop problem. At those prices, the only buyers are extreme fans buying it almost more like a merchandise item (compare figurines) than people who want to view the content. I know this is a thing in Japan-- the anime releases tend to be a few episodes at a time, at prices that would be considered astronomical most places.

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.

Japanese manga is still really cheap. The latest volume of One Piece is 484 Yen on Amazon Japan which is about $3.50 USD. An English US volume is $10. Books in Japan are absurdly cheap in general, I believe by law.

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.

The same thing is frequently true of Japanese video games as well, often seemingly arbitrarily costing several times comparable titles. I'm quite curious what drives this "cultural" phenomena. It seems almost certain that their price:demand curve is messed up to the point that lowering the price would result in increased revenue, but they seem very content to stick with this system - apparently outside of games as well.

Anybody with any insights into Japanese culture/business? I've always wondered why this was, or if it's something as simple as inertia.

Anyway now Blu-ray for anime is tend to be a fan goods rather than practical media, while paperbook is still decent media for manga. Many people no longer have Blu-ray player equipment, and obviously not work for smartphone/tablet. Average people just watch anime by streaming subscription. Manga subscription is growing but not a major thing for popular mangas.