On a scale of 1 to 10...

On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being "flowers sprout everywhere it steps like the goddamn forest spirit" and 10 being "archeologists debate whether or not it ever actually existed", how dead is the OVA market?

>"flowers sprout everywhere it steps like the goddamn forest spirit"
How does that describe the living state of anything?

The implication would be that it's so damn alive that life leaks out of it

Watch an anime son, goddamn.

It's dead with little exception.

Late-night TV anime covers its niche.

In terms of subject material, sure, but not budget or--sometimes--episode length.

6, uncommon but can still be found with varying degrees of quality

iria zeiram was pretty good

LWA 1 and 2, for a recent example, were OVAs.

It's, for the most part, dead because the budget assumptions are untenable. The very top - Garden of Sinners, Yamato 2199, Gundam Unicorn and The Origin, etc - escaped upward as short-run movies; the spinoffs which didn't really need a budget but didn't really deserve a whole TV series found the OAD niche; and the high-concept ideas can KIND of lean on Young Animators Project and related. The remainder are just fucked by the industry's reliance on overseas markets where absolutely everything is either part of your $9.95 monthly sub or ignored except by the very, very declined state of fansubbing (which wouldn't make any money anyway).

Some of the best selling anime of the decade have been OVAs, but since you're a blind nostalgiafag I guess that fact doesn't matter. Don't worry, if you want to see shitty mindless action Hollywood will always have your back.

>budget
This isn't nearly as much of an actual concern to the Japanese as you think it might be

Nope. LWA was a TV special, Enchanted Parade was a short-run movie, and 2 is a normal TV series.

This .
It's not so much the budget that's a problem, it's the idea of producing something, not showing it to anybody, and expecting people to buy it.
Stuff that gets broadcast via TV or that gets cinema screenings sells much better than stuff that doesn't. OVAs are only realistic when the franchise is so huge that people are going to buy it blindly.

>short-run movie
Don't start going down the music sub-sub-sub-sub genre bullshit train with me.

What the fuck is a "short run movie" and how does it differ from an OVA?

Freedom Project was good, and also an OVA, and not too long ago.

>Sup Forumsnon doesn't know what a movie is
It's something that they show in theaters. Leave your basement and try one someday, you may like it.

The volume is nowhere near where it used to be m8

The method of distribution and expectations for production

Quality > Quantity

the new rance series is an OVA. Hellsing just finished its OVA like two years ago. They still exist, but the market is much smaller for them.

Quantity provides quality

You shoot more bullets you're more likely to hit the target, and having a wider variety of stuff to choose from is always better. I mean, if we were somehow combining them all to make better ones, that argument would make sense, but as it is we could have quantity with no cost to the quality of what's there.

I recognize that ot's nit a great business model for today's market, but TV shows tend to have restrictive financial ties to boardrooms, and movies have length limits, both of which are escaped by the OVA format, and I think it's a shame that we don't have more.

This also leads into a negative feedback loop; when the argument for buying an OVA sight-unseen can only be "from the makers of", fewer OVAs means fewer ways to promote other OVAs means fewer OVAs means...

You are forgetting that there are anime that are not OVAs.

Hellsing was started when they were still sort of a thing though.