Anime art boxes in todays market?

[scriptweaver]

I've noticed something interesting lately and wanted to confirm whether or not this is actually a thing.

Has anyone else noticed that over the years, we've been getting less and less Art boxes included in box sets of anime?
When I say art boxes I mean thick wood boxes or hard cover boxes that feature art work and pictures all around it and act as a way to organize your collection. For me at least, the only time I've seen something "like" this appear in recent yrs is in overpriced blu-ray sets. Whenever a dvd boxset comes out, its always in a thin paper slip cover, nothing special really.

heres a few examples of a hard cover art box: 
 

Here's some examples of the slip cover and blu ray boxes I mentioned: (2014 AoT bluray/dvd combo with artbox sells for 100$, probably the more reasonable out of the new artbox sets I've found, but still pretty pricey)  (Baccano bluray boxset released in 2011 and can be found for 250-300$ USED (about 750$ new)) (all slip covers generally look like the steins gate example to some extent. its just a thin paper jacket you put over a dvd case)

 

[LoopyPanda]

Very rarely have I seen hard cover art boxes; I've seen an NGE art box before.

But the rest of the time I've only seen the DVD sets in paper slip jackets.

 

[ShineCero]

Huh. That's an interesting point- very rarely I've seen hard cover boxes on disc sets and- if there are- will always be dvd sets in paper slips. We probably don't see them as much due to be being ridiculously overpriced in Japan - while the international version is cheaper which prompt Japanese fans to preferred the international releases.

 

[JamesYTP]

Interestingly that kind of packaging used to be the norm for US releases. Ya see in the 90s and whatnot America (and I assume the rest of the western world) used the same general business model as Japan. Their target buyers were video rental stores and die hard collectors who were willing to dole out a couple hundred bucks for a VHS (and later DVD) set. They were always sold through catalogs and stuff, never anything that they needed to even worry about getting on store shelves. Even 10-15 years ago when anime was a more mass market thing there were remnants of this.

Mostly Re: the thread, about 7 or 8 years ago this did start getting phased out as the anime business in the US fell apart for a while. Standard DVD cases were cheaper. Nowadays the anime biz has rebuilt itself but just as much of the money from it comes from streaming revenue from hulu, netflix and stuff as it does from home video sales, considering that and the fact that standard DVD/Blu-Ray cases are more shelf space efficient and easier to mass market it never really has made sense for anyone to go back to that except for limited/collector's edition stuff.

 

[scriptweaver]

Interestingly that kind of packaging used to be the norm for US releases. Ya see in the 90s and whatnot America (and I assume the rest of the western world) used the same general business model as Japan. Their target buyers were video rental stores and die hard collectors who were willing to dole out a couple hundred bucks for a VHS (and later DVD) set. They were always sold through catalogs and stuff, never anything that they needed to even worry about getting on store shelves. Even 10-15 years ago when anime was a more mass market thing there were remnants of this.

Mostly Re: the thread, about 7 or 8 years ago this did start getting phased out as the anime business in the US fell apart for a while. Standard DVD cases were cheaper. Nowadays the anime biz has rebuilt itself but just as much of the money from it comes from streaming revenue from hulu, netflix and stuff as it does from home video sales, considering that and the fact that standard DVD/Blu-Ray cases are more shelf space efficient and easier to mass market it never really has made sense for anyone to go back to that except for limited/collector's edition stuff.

That's a very logical reasoning as to why there's less art boxes nowadays. As for the 90s thing, as long as you went for the dub and not the sub, the video collection set prices weren't as bad as they could have been for Americans (though I cannot deny the fact that anime was exorbitantly expensive back then because it was a still a young niche culture). In fact, my ova collectors box set of Gatchaman would have costed about 60ish$ by catalog prices for all three tapes (not too bad I think considering Ranma 1/2 and Evangelion we're 25$ per dubbed tape back then).

 

[JamesYTP]

Oh yeah, OVAs and movies weren't as bad cost wise, Manga Entertainment's catalog was a lot cheaper than most others. I still remember the ads for Ranma 1/2 sets in the back of some old mangas and stuff that said "now only $195.99" and stuff lol. Heck I remember those old DBZ saga VHS sets that you'd see in suncoast and stuff were pretty expensive and that was a mainstream title! Although I seriously doubt too many people actually had the living space to store those lol.