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As the kind of guy who's willing to try anything once, I'll be attending the virtual version of the anime convention @Otakuthon this weekend. If there's anything interesting worth reporting, I'll mention it in this thread. :)
Virtual greeters/convention mascots Yurika and Yumi have already engaged me. In English and French, no less. :)
43 minutes into the convention and the floor's quite busy already.
Interesting! One of the virtual attendees in this year's Artist Alley is Japanese illustrator @kantoku_5th. :)
The main events at the convention appear to be a mixture of exclusive prerecorded original material and livestreams. One of them includes a concert by pianist @ManningLaurence, who does video game covers. Like "Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse" here. :)
The musicians of the Video Game Orchestra are performing a live concert from their homes in Boston, Massachusetts and Los Angeles, California. :)
Just attended a Q&A panel with Hiroshi Matsuyama ( @PIROSHI_CC2), CEO of CyberConnect2 ( @cc2information and @CC2MTL), who provided some interesting information about the anime, manga, and Japanese video game industry which I'll be summarizing. He once sketched Naruto for me. 
VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY - PART 1: In Japan, the number of new video game titles released per year has dropped from its peak of 983 in 2007 to 411 in 2019. This is due to the expansion of the mobile market and the shrinking of the console market and people having less time to game.
VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY - PART 2: In Japan, hardcore gamers purchase an average of 8.8 new video games per year while casual gamers buy less than half that amount (3.6 new video games).
VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY - PART 3: "Pokémon Sword and Shield" sold a staggering 3 million physical copies in Japan last year. "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" placing second at 1.09 million is all the more impressive considering that that game was released the year before (December 2018).
VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY - PART 4: Speaking of "Pokémon Sword and Shield" and "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate", the observant will note that that 9 of the 10 top-selling video games in Japan in 2019 were Nintendo Switch games. I'm guessing that makes a lot of Nintendo's investors happy.
VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY - PART 5: Something interesting that Matsuyama-san called attention to is the tremendous disparity in the Top 50. While the 1st place game sold 3 million copies, the 10th place game sold less than 1/6th of that (500000 copies) and the 50th place one 86000.
VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY - PART 6: A rule of thumb is that you have to sell more than 100000 copies of a video game in Japan to be in the black. An even more sobering statistic is that only 20% of video games manage to do this and 80% of them actually end up losing money. 
VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY - PART 7: This is a no-brainer, but what sells well internationally doesn't necessary sell well in Japan. You just have to take one good look at the lack of overlap between the console game titles listed in these two graphics to see how greatly tastes differ.
VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY - PART 8: Given that you only have a 20% chance of turning a profit, Matsuyama-san stresses the importance of doing your best to creating the next mega-hit, knowing what makes your customers happy, and how investors don't like people who're oblivious to this.
VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY - PART 9: The first step to making a good video game is to do your research, which means spending a lot of time watching anime, reading manga, playing video games, and experiencing things. Turns out veteran creators are nerds/geeks/otaku. Shocking, I know. 
VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY - PART 10: The Japanese video game market was valued at $15.5 billion U.S. in 2018, with about 75% of that going to PC and mobile online gaming and $400 million U.S. to console software and hardware. However, even though the market doubled in size... 1/2
...between 2009 and 2018, the PC and mobile segments of the market increased in size by a factor of 6 during those 9 years while the console segment actually shrank by about a third. Also, of the 110 million PS4s sold worldwide, only 8.3 million of those sales were in Japan. 2/2
VIDEO GAME INDUSTRY - PART 11: CyberConnect2 managed to sell around 6 million copies of "Naruto Ultmate Ninja Storm 4" worldwide over four and a half years, though only 150000 of those sales were in Japan, so the foreign market can most definitely influence profits in Japan.
ANIME INDUSTRY - PART 1: During any given week, there're about 100 different anime series on the air, of which about 45% are cour-length and the other 55% are continuing, with a cour being "a three-month unit of television broadcasting, corresponding to one of the four seasons".
ANIME INDUSTRY - PART 2: Matsuyama-san humorously pointed out that, for those of you wondering why children are up watching anime between 11:00 P.M. and 3:00 A.M. at night, that's because Japan actually makes shows for a wide variety of ages, so adults are watching those shows.
ANIME INDUSTRY - PART 3: To crunch the numbers from earlier, if about 45 new anime series are released per cour and there are 4 cours per year, that works out to roughly 200 new anime series being released every year. My poor friend @fairladytami74's backlog will never end. 
ANIME INDUSTRY - PART 4: Now for a pretty harsh dose of reality: the chances of you making a successful anime are actually halved compared to video games. For the between 1 and 4 breakout hits of the season (10%), you have 40 shows (90%!) that're in the red and losing money. 
ANIME INDUSTRY - PART 5: So, with these dismal figures, how the heck do Japanese animation studios manage to stay afloat? One word: MERCHANDISING. The sales from all those figures, posters, and other knickknacks apparently add up quickly and help you push you back into the black.
MANGA INDUSTRY - PART 1: While it seems pretty obvious, Matsuyama-san points out that, as opposed to video game developers who're paid regular wages by their employers, mangaka are freelancers/self-employed and don't earn a cent unless their works are published in a magazine.
MANGA INDUSTRY - PART 2: So how much do mangaka actually earn from drawing? As it turns out, not much. The average manuscript fees/royalties received amounts to around $9.27 US to $27.81 US per page, with higher end publishers paying between $46.35 US and $92.70 US per page.
MANGA INDUSTRY - PART 3: Suppose you're a machine who churns out 19 pages a week at maximum pay and earn around $1700 US. Surely you can make a comfortable living from that? Well...no, apparently, because a large chunk of that goes to paying for your assistants and studio.
MANGA INDUSTRY - PART 4: And it's not just the mangaka who're hard up. Manga magazine publishers are also in the red because they don't have advertising revenue as a crutch since their publications have relatively few ads as opposed to beauty/fashion magazines, which have a ton.
MANGA INDUSTRY - PART 5: So how does anyone make money in the manga industry? The answer: tankoubon (collected volumes of published stories, the Japanese equivalent of graphic novels). About 1000 unique tankoubon are published a month, very few of which make it to Western shores.
A brief interlude: There's an upcoming panel in a few minutes called "The History of Japanese Pornographic Images". And it's in French. 
