Fan reaction seems to range from ecstatic to cautiously optimistic at the news announced last week that Bandai Visual USA is to be fully liquidated by the end of September, with Bandai Entertainment taking up all its licensing, marketing, and distribution.

The announcement could easily have slipped by without much notice in North America, since the press releases only seem to be available thus far in Japanese. But the information is gradually spreading after the parent company, Bandai Namco Holdings, made the news known.

Bandai Visual USA was established in 2005, to be a marketer of titles produced by Bandai Visual in Japan. But the pricing of their products was much higher than the price of similar products from other distributors, and fans strongly resisted paying. As fans on one forum suggested, Bandai visual didn't seem to understand that charging $50 for a two-episode DVD just wasn't going to move the titles.

This is the source of the "cautious" in the "cautiously optimistic" outlook with which some people have greeted the latest development. Fans are waiting to see if Bandai Entertainment takes over the pricing structure as well as the products of Bandai Visual USA. If that happens, the new version of the company will likely have just as much trouble getting fans to fork over as the original company did.

But at least some mysterious movements in and around Bandai Visual USA are finally explained by this upcoming liquidation. On March 19th, on the company's fairly new Dot-Anime site, then-president Tatsunori Konno made a sober blog post containing several elements. First, the three new series they had just announced with great fanfare for the summer (Shigofumi, true tears, and sola) were being postponed, despite BVUSA's being right in the middle of promotional planning. At the same time, several episodes they planned to begin streaming on the Dot-Anime site itself were also delayed, and eventually cancelled outright, although other series eventually took their place.

Konno made another disturbing statement about the anime business in general: "The US anime market looks like it's sinking every day. Some say it's because of the extremely high licensing fee by the Japanese licensors. Or it's because of illegal digital distribution of fansubs. Others say it's because there are are too many titles in the market." This mystified many people, who felt that the anime market was actually doing fairly well - at least, for other companies.

And if the fans on the forums reflect the general attitude of BVUSA's target market, the problem likely was the high fees connected to Bandai Visual titles. Which meant that Konno's proposed successor - Mr. Hori, the licensing manager of Bandai Visual (Japan) - was probably not going to have any more success than Konno had had.

So fans seem to think that the dissolution of Bandai Visual USA will turn out to be a good thing, as long as the prices diminish to what the rest of the North American market appears to be dictating. Here's hoping that if prices were the main problem for BVUSA, the bosses in Japan don't get stubborn and start pulling Bandai Entertainment down with the same practices.

Meanwhile, no one has yet said whether Bandai Entertainment will be taking over the Dot-Anime website, and there's no news about what will happen to Bandai Visual's newly established online store at Amazon.com.