Is there a substitution effect? Heck yes. Nobody buys all the shows they watch fansubbed. People are going to gravitate towards the shows they really enjoyed, and not buy the ones that they didn’t enjoy. This isn’t a surprise to anybody.

But part of the beneficial effect is redundant. If a show’s a really good show in a genre you generally enjoy, watching the fansub isn’t necessarily instrumental to your purchase of the show. You don’t have to have watched all of Eva to hear that Eva was pretty good! Indeed, there are all sorts of reviews and previews and what have you, specifically oriented to giving people an idea of how good a given show is; your strong players don’t need the extra support, because they’re strong players.

But the harm it does to relatively weaker players is pretty large. These aren’t necessarily lousy shows! But for a lot of shows, once you’ve watched it, you’ve extracted a lot of the entertainment value out of the show – just like reading a detective novel, “whodunit” only works once. In an environment where you’re watching everything on fansubs as it comes out, though, the value for those shows for you takes a big hit – you’ve already got the entertainment out of it, so you’re not nearly as likely to purchase, even though you might have purchased and enjoyed the show if you hadn’t already watched the whole thing.

Those are precisely the shows that operate on smaller margins to begin with, so the damage that it does to them is proportionately greater. An extra thousand people buying Azumanga isn’t going to make or break that show, but there are plenty of niche titles where that’s the difference between a bit of profit and a big loss.

1) you NEED fansubs to promote the less mainstream titles, that’s how people fall in love with those titles in the first place. John implicitly recognizes this.

2) but invariably these small fry fans (I put myself squarely in this category) have to step up to the plate and buy. It’s ok if only 50% of Naruto fansub viewers buy (I just made up the number), because that’s 50% of a lot. But if only 50% of Simoun fansub viewers buy, that’s hardly any sales.

3) In that way, John’s plea chickens out by asking fans to do what fans do. Depends on who you ask, you get different definitions of how a fan should act. But yea yea it’s a pride thing, partly. I don’t look down at fans of anime who don’t own anything legit, but they should all know they suck more than people who buy the legit releases. ;)

And LOL @ Le Chevalier D’eon. I sure won’t be buying that…

Or in short, while I do care about the state of licensing, it has to come second to keeping an eye on the bank balance.