@DarthEnder:
Yeah, the cost of recording a language track is totally an excuse to double the cost of your product…
An Episode of One Piece costs a lot of money to dub, I think it was somewhere around 10,000. Plus whatever they had to pay Toei for the rights in the first place, which aren't usually a low amount considering it's Fucking Toei.
And people tend to forget that FUNimation does all this work ALONE.
When you watch the Simpsons, as it ends you see "20th Century Fox" and "Gracie Films". And then there's the 1000s of pieces of product placement and endorsements The Simpsons has.
When you watch Futurama, it ends with "30th Century Fox", "The Curiosity Company"
Fox's House M.D. is produced by Heel & Toe Films, Shore Z Productions, Bad Hat Harry Productions, and NBC Universal Television Group.
They SHARE the cost and share ALL of the revenue including Ad Revenue and DVD sales.
And then there's Syndication.
Even if DVDs were never released, the Simpsons would still have made the creators MILLIONS Of Dollars on its own. It's Syndicated Everywhere. The CW still shows it, Fox shows old episodes. They still make ad revenue on that. Even old episodes.
Plus, the Simpsons (as an example, but this is true of EVERYTHING produced domestically) is owned and released on DVD by the people who made it (Fox and Gracie Films) So everything they make goes straight to them.
I think I have the thing that will just kill your argument flat.
The Simpsons was produced in 1989. The first DVD release happened in 2001. That's 11-12 years.
What, was the company just making nothing on the show up until then?
No, they were making a LOT of money on Ad revenue, product placements, endorsements, etc etc. They were CERTAINLY making enough to not have to do any home releases of entire seasons for more than a decade. They were making so incredibly much money that the Voice cast fought and successfully got incredibly high pay raises, years before the DVD release started.
You don't seem to understand that, Ad revenue, product placement, etc etc is enough on its own to make the company a profit COMPLETELY WITHOUT a DVD release. The DVDs are just a way to make EVEN MORE Profit.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report have never been released in "Season" sets, the most you'll ever get from either of those shows is the OCCASIONAL "Best of" DVDs.
How the fuck does that show stay on the air if it can't have a DVD Release?!
By your logic, they're just like FUNimation and they NEED that DVD Release to make any money at all.
The answer is, they stay on the air because they make PLENTY OF money WITHOUT A DVD release, through ad revenue, product placement, etc, etc.
FUNimation can do NONE of that. Pretty much ALL Of their revenue from One Piece COMES DIRECTLY FROM THE DVD SALES!
They can't let Luffy sell Candy Bars on commercials. They can't digitally add a George Foreman Grill into Sanji's kitchen. They can't have Nami's Baby Telesnail have the Apple logo and say "iSnail" on it.
And they most certainly can't make ANYTHING off of a TV run.
ANY TV show you watch that's been around for a season or two, I guarantee you, not just showing on one channel.
Scrubs is canceled, it no longer airs new episodes. It still makes everyone money from Ads on Comedy Central, The CW and WGN are all showing MULTIPLE Episodes of Scrubs several times a day all week. Every single one of those showings makes the company money.
THAT is why they can afford to make the DVDs cheaper than FUNi does.
The closest domestic equivalent to the situation FUNimation is in, are the Futurama movies (AKA: Season 6)
The movies are direct-to-DVD affairs. They were EVEN AIRED ON TV (after the fact) with the rest of the run which generates Ad revenue. And they EVEN have Product placement that generates revenue too. (Zapp Brannigan had to stop to fix his XM Satellite radio in one)
The movies were produced as 16 episodes that fit together as movies (and can be separated for a later broadcast)
The MSRP on each is $29.99, you can get them for about $20 each at Amazon. That's $20 for 4 episodes worth of content. That means if you buy just 3 of them, which is 13 episodes worth of Content (The same as One Piece's sets are) you're being charged $90 MSRP and about $60 if you go to the right online store. And again, that is with a TV Broadcast and Ad revenue that happened later.
Vs. One Piece which is $50 MSRP and is $20-$35 actual price depending on where you go.
(I know I kept bringing up the Simpsons, but it's the perfect example because it's about as long as One Piece and it's just about as popular here as OP is in Japan.)
So Yes, FUNimation has a very good reason for having to charge a very reasonable price for One Piece.