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Its not a factor... because it wasnt the target audience. It has dubs because thats what they have access to on hand and that some people would enjoy it in japanese. But the target audience was definitely western.
But that other stuff didn’t get dubbed. Dubbing is a choice, and not a cheap one, especially in Japan. They even got KENN and Aoi Yuuki for the lead roles, it wasn’t some second-thought dub “just because”.
The MAL definition has been tested for years and has proven to be pretty effective (most other sites have a similar one afaik), the biggest detractors are the ones who think stuff like ATLA or RWBY (main series) should be considered anime just because of the style, but they’re generally ignored in database matters.
having a dub is just a choice, like having any american cartoon having a japanese dub is a choice (e.g if you've ever heard japanese dub of spongebob or king of the hill for example). It's a choice that trigger made because they were targetting people who watch anime, but not necessarily for japanese people. as the end target regardless was westerners.
Studio Trigger has history of targeting the western audience for its random projects. Take for example Little witch academia main and side projects were all kickstarters(over japanese alternatives). One of the side projects was a VR game, something a lot of Japanese people do not have their hands on.
KENN is barely known outside Japan because his most famous anime work was on Yugioh GX (which everyone watched dubbed) and the rest of his fame was mostly live-action musical performances. He’s not a seiyuu you pick if you want to appeal to westerners.
And yes, they do stuff on Kickstarter because it’s more known in the rest of the world, but that doesn’t mean they’re only targeting the rest of the world. They just wanted as much budget as possible.
LWA having a VR game is also barely relevant since even Kaiji has a VR game and the amount of people who know Kaiji outside of Japan is probably less than the Japanese people with an Xbox.
The Kaiji VR game had a switch port, as well as has a mobile port, both which would have much larger japanese audiences, something the LWA vr game lacks.
But, as you said, those were ports. The game was made to be a PSVR exclusive, and was funded according to that. I don’t think they’d do that if they didn’t know it was worth even without the ports.
Anyway, I wanted some clear stats for Edgerunners so I dug up Netflix. This is its third week, and at the bottom you can see only 7 countries had it in the top 10 for 3 weeks, most of them being asian. It went pretty damn well there too.
other countries in asia is different than japan because virtually all other countries in Asia are very PC centric. Japan is the extreme outlier in asia.
That doesn’t change that, at least in relation to Netflix viewership percentage, it went better in Japan than in most western countries. It didn’t even get Top 10 on launch week in the US.
its better in japan, because its essentially a netflix exclusive, where usually other anime is watched via their local networks. it's induced popularity through exclusivity.
It’s a Netflix exclusive everywhere, but it still worked better in Japan. It was undeniably a success, and I think that’s enough to qualify it as a product made (also) for the Japanese market.