Manga

The one thing that sales do benefit is the potential for future localization and to be fair that does matter if you can’t read the raws

This is why niche titles are shifting. People complain about companies like viz doing less with niche shonen and yuri and stuff, instead translating tons of BL. But you know who buys tons of physicals? BL peeps. And when the expected sales are 3-5k units, if that, might as well go for the ones that drop cash

That said it’s still crap that viz doesn’t localize smaller titles. They can do digital only releases. They have a one time fixed cost of the licensing and localization then just bandwidth, which is not much for digital books, and still make a bit of profit. But their mission isn’t to bring media to people, it’s to make fat stacks

Full disclosure: I don’t have a dog in this fight really bc i can read Japanese and just get raws in Japanese. I typically pirate everything and I do for big titles like oshi no ko (which had a weak ass ending) and shit but for small titles I do buy them to support the creators. Buying from Japanese sites gives the artist (typically) an 8-10% cut and with the weak yen digital titles are real affordable