“What about a Steam Service for Manga and Anime?”

There’s a whole load of mind boggling things to say about OneManga being one of the top sites for hip young people to go to today, but when ANN decides to act like a spoiled schoolkid and whine about how horrible the whole site is for making money off ads and not contributing to the creators, you start to think that these people are living in some kind of stupid bubble. I mean, it’s not like they’re sticking their own watermark on it and calling it their own, right? RIGHT?

But anyway, their whining and a few interesting posts on digital distribution and how Japan is averse to it, I started to look at something that has been working for quite a while and is touted as one of the miracles of distribution.

Enter Steam. It’s an application by Valve that allows you to buy video games online (without the need for icky CDKeys or DRM, if you so desire, kinda), view media, and surf the web (if you really wanted to).  It’s main function, I believe, is to become a one-stop game-launching application.

“But don’t we have a similar service for other forms of media, like, let’s say, Apple’s iTunes, you fucking idiot?” Well yeah, Apple’s iTunes did cross my mind. But do you really want Apple to control what you want to see? You’ll never get to see Kodomo no Jikan on your e-Reader, ever. Or Omamori Himari. Or some of the more mature-themed (by that I meant naked breasts and hardcore porn :3c) stuff you see in Japanese animation.

Hence the need for a Steam-like application for anime, manga and all the other related things. It’ll help allay the fears of the Japanese fear of piracy, plus whoever is willing to create and fund this, they’ll have to be willing to talk to the DOZENS of companies who may eventually want in to see what kinds of features they want in the app. For starters, portability and security.

I’m still wondering why no one has ever tried to implement Steam for anime. This thing could blow iTunes out of the water, if only in Japan.