> I assume the golden age of Tier 1 fan subs is over
That's just because the legal options were easily available, right? Kind of like people stopped pirating as much when Netflix was actually decent. But now the tides are turning again, so maybe the fan subs will start coming back as well.
There used to be an unwritten rule in fansubbing that you should only fansub anime that didn't have a licensed release - but of course that was during the time when barely any anime got licensed.
Still, though, I wonder if that mindset is still going to be around.
Less now, but the bar is higher because now there's a baseline good enough product, so even if in the past you'd have done it anyway with more care, now unless the official sub is bad enough, why would you bother?
I remember seeing (I think Netflix release) of Komi-san can't communicate, noticing A lot of things being missed, like Komi's literal main manner of communication (A notebook where she writes) not getting any translation for some episodes, or a lot of things I'd have to fill others in that normally at least would have been a T/N in fansub
It was bad enough that I went looking elsewhere to see if I had missed more than I realized, and the fansub did have everything covered
At the moment the threshold for a fansub getting made or not is whether or not the licensed releases are "good enough". If the official releases are terrible, expect someone to step up and at least fix the typesetting even if they use the script from the license.
Also, it’s trivial to standup a minimal quality stt+translation workflow in something like comfyui, all freely available models, and run on modest consumer gpu, ~3050 is just fine. If you’re handy with this tech you can do a lot better. If crunchyroll is only going to have slightly better quality then it can be appealing even to moderate fans who wouldn’t spend the time doing things manually.
That's just because the legal options were easily available, right? Kind of like people stopped pirating as much when Netflix was actually decent. But now the tides are turning again, so maybe the fan subs will start coming back as well.