Please check out
this thread, and use either of the links in its opening post. This will let you check out the listings for the upcoming Spring 2017 anime season.
Two general things quickly stand out for me:
1. The sheer quantity of shows.
2. The fact that a
good number of these shows are anime-originals. So this quantity of shows isn't purely a reflection of other industries still viewing anime as a good means of glorified advertisement.
I'm honestly a little surprised by these two things. Why am I surprised? Because as
0utf0xZer0 has carefully chronicled, anime on DVD/Blu-Ray hasn't been selling particularly well over the past year or so. There's still a few big sellers, but sales seem to have fallen off a fair bit for mid-tier shows.
So, simply put,
how is anime doing it? How is the anime industry managing to continue to put out so much product? Looking at the upcoming Spring 2017 season listing, you'd swear that anime was in a total golden age, at least commercially speaking. How is the anime world managing to afford all of this new content given declining DVD/Blu-Ray sales? From what I can recall reading, animation is not cheap to produce!
Is this a reflection of Crunchyroll's success, maybe? Has CR's success resulted in a good, strong source of additional income for the Japanese animation industry?
That's the first possible explanation that crosses my mind, but I'm curious to know what the Knights of the RRRound Table have to say about this!