Anime fans ask:

I've been following some worrying developments with theCrunchyroll Store lately and wanted to get your take on what's happening. You might have seen the news that theCrunchyroll Store is allegedly pulling low-selling in-stock inventory items. Word has been circulating aboutMediaOCD becoming a new major storefront forDiscotek titles after approximately 100 SKUs were pulled without warning fromCrunchyroll. What do these delistings mean for publishers that aren't backed bySony, likeDiscotek,AnimEigo, andGKIDS? Where will they sell their stock now? Does this align with what's happening to physical media storefronts in general, or is this something specific to anime? And honestly, does this look like what happens before a bubble pops, like what happened with manga at Borders, or is this just furthering a monopoly where theCrunchyroll storefront is becoming selective about its competitors' titles? How much of this is connected to post-COVID market corrections, and are modern anime fans simply buying different kinds of merchandise instead of home video these days?

Anime is a very hot commodity these days. When it comes to global distribution and marketing, things have never been better. More anime series than ever before are available to more people in more countries via subscription video-on-demand services. On top of that, more anime feature films are appearing regularly on cinema screens in more locations than ever before, too. We've never had it so good.

You can't make a global multi-billion-dollar anime omelette without breaking a few eggs and pissing off a few fans. Over the past 15 years, indie distributors have either fallen by the wayside or been consolidated into much larger operations with endless resources, scale, and reach. With great anime comes great responsibility, and the recent revelations about the de-listing of some physical media from theCrunchyroll Store once again illustrate the friction point between being “The world's most popular anime brand” and delivering every fan, every experience they expect.

It has been almost a decade sinceSony acquiredFunimation, the largest anime home video distributor in North America, and as we are seeing, delivering to the anime fandom is a specific skill that requires the provision of multiple touch-points, some of which are more profitable than others, but regardless of profitability, all are essential and interdependent. This is why whatSony chooses to do in its day-to-day management of delivering to its subscribers and the anime community in general is under so much scrutiny. They promised to make things even better, and they seem to be reneging on that promise.

Your question is a good one. It actually consists of half a dozen related questions, and I will attempt to address all of them. It is timely, and it touches on several concerning trends in how anime reaches American fans. Let me break down what's actually happening here, because it's more complex than it might appear on the surface. We are fortunate that I have some amazing industry contacts, whom I was able to reach out to on your behalf, and provide you with some excellent analysis.

First, let's establish what we're seeing. TheCrunchyroll Store, formerlyRight Stuf beforeSony's acquisition in August 2022, has indeed been systematically delisting SKUs from independent publishers. This isn't limited to just home video releases from companies likeDiscotek orGKIDS; they're also removing manga volumes that aren't moving quickly enough, which in some cases means entire series are being eliminated from their catalog. The originalRight Stuf value proposition was to be "the everything store" for anime and manga. If it was in print, you could find it there, and the recent changes to inventory management onCrunchyroll Store represent a shift in how the storefront operates.

According to sources within the distribution community,Crunchyroll is looking to limit its SKU count for products with low inventory turns. On a purely business level, this makes sense. Warehousing costs money, and if a product sits on a shelf for months without selling, that represents dead capital and ongoing storage expenses. One distributor I spoke with noted that, for their e-shop, they aim to make every SKU available as a matter of principle, but acknowledge that many don't sell and that they ultimately lose small amounts of money each year on warehouse storage costs relative to the few units they might move. This company is much smaller thanSony, yet it remains committed to discovery and personalised service, hallmarks of the anime delivery business since the 1980s. Service matters, which is why there are so many die-hard anime fans for life in established overseas markets like France, the USA, the UK, and Australia. We (industry professionals and distribution brands) always busted our collective arses to deliver to the individual fan exactly what they wanted and needed in order to immerse themselves in their hobby.

This is why I am concerned about this latest development. It is yet another sign thatSony is determined to corporatize anime, and this is the crucial point:Crunchyroll's approach to category management for anime and manga media will create a self-defeating cycle. UnlikeRight Stuf, which actively marketed products and maintained relationships with smaller vendors,Crunchyroll has not been engaging in the same level of outreach or promotional activity for independent publishers' catalogs. If you don't market a product, of course, it won't sell. The result is that slower-moving inventory gets blamed for poor performance when the real issue is a lack of discoverability and promotion. While I don't believe this is a deliberate attempt to harm independent publishers' businesses, that will certainly be a side effect of these decisions.

So, where does this leave publishers likeDiscotek,Viz Media,GKIDS, and others not backed bySony's resources? They have options, but each comes with significant trade-offs. Amazon remains a necessity; otherwise, you're missing "the average customer," but the platform has become increasingly hostile to physical media. The interface isn't great either. You are competing against listings from other countries, bootleggers, random third-party storefronts, and Amazon's own prioritization of digital video-on-demand products. Margins are tough, and Amazon defines shopping culture in ways that hurt smaller operations, from return policies to shipping cost expectations.

Many publishers already operate their own limited webshops or have relationships with marketplace aggregators. When a publisher sells directly, their margin is significantly higher than paying Amazon, Walmart, or others a substantial cut. The challenge is discovery. In a crowded media market, how do fans find these independent storefronts? The whole point ofRight Stuf was to solve this problem. It was a destination where knowledgeable anime fans could find everything, curated by people who understood and cared about the products they sold. That concept appears to be ending, and it reflects the lack of importanceSony places on experienced anime curation and customer relationship management. I don't think they understand quite how different anime fans are from other types of entertainment consumers, which isn't surprising when you consider how they have managed their relationships with other, equally demanding audiences, such asgamers.

This brings us to your question about whether this aligns with broader trends in physical media retail. The answer is yes, but with important caveats specific to anime. The physical media market has certainly moved into a new phase. Major studios are moving away from releases because they believe streaming is the future and "no one will buy" physical media anymore. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: if there's no supply but there is demand, it creates demand for piracy instead.

Yet we're also seeing boutique publishers make high-quality releases and do quite well. When Disney released steelbooks of the original Tron and Tron: Legacy alongside Tron: Ares, both sold out within days and now command high prices on the secondary market. Disney underestimated demand, resulting in a lost revenue opportunity. Physical retail spaces have declined dramatically; try finding Blu-rays at Walmart (small section), Target (tiny end caps), or Best Buy (gone entirely), but demand hasn't disappeared. Interestingly, much of that retail space is being reprioritized for vinyl records, which itself was declared dead not long ago and is now a huge, highly collectible market.

Crunchyroll seems to have forgotten something crucial about home video with regard to anime as a lifestyle and hobby. When it comes to enjoying anime, physical media isn't treated as a mere consumable, like picking up a Blu-ray copy ofAvatar: Fire and Ash. Home video releases for anime fans are generally treated as collectibles. Fans have realized over the years that licenses are finite and that highly compressed streams aren't as good as full-range home video releases with art, extra features, and the ability to watch whenever and however they want: at watch parties, with friends, without worrying about licensing expirations. This is a fundamental misread of the core anime consumer. While not every anime fan will buy home video, many will buy their favorites, and hardcore fans will absolutely buy higher-end releases with extras that increase collectability.

The situation with manga is even more problematic. Unlike home video releases, manga series can run for tens or hundreds of volumes. Older volumes naturally decrease in sales velocity because they're not new. Fans of a series continue buying later volumes, but if you don't keep older volumes available, you can't bring new people into the title. No one starts a series at Volume 23, unless it's gifted to you (Who would ever say no to free manga?). This requires at least limited stocking of earlier volumes through short print runs to keep them available. While digital manga exists, core manga fans treat their libraries as collections to display, and they want the physical books.

Is this evidence of a bubble popping, like what happened with manga at Borders in the late 2000s? I don't believe so. That was a situation in which the market genuinely overextended itself through unsustainable growth. What we're seeing now is a vendor making a conscious decision to maximize their revenue by cutting what they view as underperforming inventory. The anime and manga market remains healthy; it's not collapsing. What's changing is the retail infrastructure around it.

The COVID factor is real but overstated. Yes, anime and manga surged during the pandemic, and we're now about five years out from that initial spike. There has been some course correction, but the audience that discovered anime during lockdown hasn't entirely vanished. Consumer spending has been affected by inflation, tariffs, and general economic uncertainty, which impacts purchasing patterns. Younger fans may be more interested in certain types of merchandise than in home video, but I would argue this is as much about availability and marketing as about innate preference.

What concerns me most is the loss of a centralized, expert-curated storefront. People feel nostalgic for storefronts, physical or digital, that could scale enough to be successful while being run by people who were experts in and cared about what they sold. Direct sales via brand channels and official stores are probably the closest answer, but they fragment the market and make discovery harder for consumers.

The delisting means creating more work for publishers to reach and connect with fans. It means fans need to know multiple storefronts exist and check them individually. It means the casual browser who might discover something unexpected while shopping for their favorite series won't have that opportunity. And critically, if demand exists but supply is artificially constrained by poor distribution, piracy results, and pirated anime goods already make upa multi-billion-dollar industry.

I hope we see publishers embrace creative solutions, likeMediaOCD's preorder-based campaigns to bring back older SKUs. This demonstrates demand and then fulfills it, solving one of the central problems of the current system. Interestingly, we're seeing a parallel trend in Japan, though from the opposite direction. Rather than delisting existing inventory, Japanese distributors are increasingly moving toward pre-order-only production. If you don't buy during the direct-to-consumer window, releases essentially become "out of print" the day they hit the market, forcing consumers into expensive second-hand markets likeMandarake and Surugaya. While this model eliminates warehousing costs and overproduction risk, it creates artificial scarcity and punishes fans who discover titles later or can't afford to buy everything immediately. Both approaches, whether American delistings or Japanese pre-order-only models, prioritize inventory management over long-term catalog accessibility. The broader issue remains: we need sustainable, discoverable ways for independent publishers to reach anime fans who want to support official releases, without forcing them into a "buy now or never" mentality or fragmenting discovery across dozens of separate storefronts. The current trajectory on both sides of the Pacific isn't encouraging.

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