Crunchyroll, the popular anime streaming service, has offered a couple of video games for a little while as the service has tried to compete with Netflix and other streaming services. However, it doesn’t look like Crunchyroll is going to follow Netflix’s lead into cloud gaming. Let me explain.
Crunchyroll Has Some Mobile Games:
Crunchyroll currently offers nine video games to subscribers who pay for Crunchyroll’s “Mega Fan” tier. The games that are available on Crunchyroll are listed below:
- Hime’s Quest
- Thunder Ray
- Yuppie Psycho
- Inbento
- Behind The Frame
- River City Girls
- Captain Velvet Meteor
- Wolfstride
- Ponpu
As you can see, the library is a lot smaller and more curated than most other gaming platforms, especially when you compare it to Netflix Games.
Why Crunchyroll Won’t Break Into Cloud Gaming
We’ve established what Crunchyroll’s game vault includes. Now let’s discuss the main reason you’re here, as I explain why we probably won’t see Crunchyroll break into cloud gaming. You can summarize this reason in one simple four-letter word, SONY.
That might be confusing to some people who don’t understand the complicated structure of the Sony Group. Crunchyroll is a subsidiary of Sony Pictures. On the other end of the spectrum, Sony Interactive Entertainment owns the popular gaming console brand PlayStation. Do you guys see where I’m going with this? PlayStation is already building out its cloud gaming platform, as well as having PlayStation Portal, which lets you play games via the cloud.
Why This Matters
Crunchyroll has around 5 million paying customers, whilst PlayStation reported 46.6 million PlayStation 5 sales as of October 2023. PlayStation is a bigger platform than Crunchyroll when it comes to user numbers. It makes more logical sense for Sony to focus on building out a cloud gaming platform for the future of PlayStation, rather than trying to build on the base of an anime streaming platform.
Crunchyroll serves a purpose as the largest anime-dedicated streaming platform, so adding anime and anime-inspired video games is a great concept, Netflix does something similar, but I don’t see Sony developing two competing cloud gaming platforms. This reminds me a bit of the Warner Brothers Games and the Adult Swim Games controversy (although I do not agree with how they are handling the rights to those games): Where two internal companies within the same company are under different divisions but do essentially the same thing.
What do you think? Do you think Crunchyroll will break into cloud gaming? Let us know on social media.
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