AnimeHow to fumble the ball when you're basically the only real player. I miss Wakanim.
Shouldn't have fucked your customer base then
That's the fucked-up thing, though. Their subscriber count has almost doubled since 2024—yet they are hemorrhaging money like this. Smells like hookers and blow in here.
Don't forget all the money wasted on the ai generated dubbing that's even worse than early days funimation.
Wasn't that Amazon Prime?
yes it was. crunchyroll did ai subs.
I take AI subs over activists rewriting character any day of the week.
100% agreed here. It’s their own fault for being too greedy.
Crunchyroll is never going to solve the problem because Crunchyroll is the problem.
The open seas be a callin' me ma8ty....yar!
Man the BitTorrent client, fire up the VPNs, load up Tor! There be torrents to download!
What anime is that? Pretty sure I’ve watched, but can not remember
Looks like Bodacious Space Pirates.
Fun fact - I visited Tokyo years ago when I had a friend living over there teaching English as part of the JET program. When I visited Ueno Park, there was a group of cosplayers in the park all in costumes from this show doing a photoshoot. I had no idea what show it was at the time, but figured it out years later when I came across a random image in a thread like this one and was able to piece it together.
Mouretsu Pirates, AKA Bodacious Space Pirates, I think.
Probably shouldn't have sold out to Sony and sold my data like twice and then given away data in obviously avoidable breaches.
- stop using AI subtitles
- fix the platform problems
- become PCI compliant
- bring back comments
Crunchyroll is a scourge on the Anime industry. The earlier it falls, the faster better services can take its place.
If Sony doesnt buy that one too
I'm out of the loop, why are people hating on crunchyroll?
Where to start. They have so many issues that there is something in there for everyone:
- price hikes and end of the free tier
- declining quality of subs and the use of AI for subs
- activist localization slash “woke” changes to the subs when humans translate <--- with the previous point, now both the pro-AI and anti-ai crowd are unhappy
- data breach (at least one, but I think they had two)
- Funimation customers got fucked since they lost access to purchased content after the merger with Crunchy
- monopolistic tendencies and general corporate greed and tactics
- comment sections got removed because people dared to be negative
And possibly a myriad others. I don't think I've ever heard Crunchy mentioned in a positive way.
don't forget that they started out as a pirate site but since they went 'legit' have spent money on anti-piracy
These are all much more substantial reasons but when I stopped using them in 2021ish it was because their apps and website were janky as fuck.
activist localization slash “woke” changes to the subs when humans translate
This I don't get. This hardly happens, if at all. I hear more complaints about it (particularly from the anti-woke crowd) than I see it happening
The fact that it happens at all is honestly baffling though. The anti-woke crowd absolutely plays it up (or more likely just gets fed sensationalized headlines and never verifies them) beyond its actual scope, but mostly it's just the crown on top of a lot of general low quality localization. Which isn't even necessarily the localizers fault, as from what I know they were often overworked and had very little time to translate, or were missing the visual context.
The recent scandal with the game yunyun syndrome is the worst I know of, but I vaguely recall some obviously politically motivated changes in meaning in anime subs. It's not made up, but it's really just one particular expression of a wider issue with tl quality.
Yeah, I'm not saying it doesn't happen, just rarely. Not nearly enough to be like "I'm happy AI translations are replacing real translations" or drop CR for it. The only few examples I know are from dubs when Funimation was still a thing (Dragon Maid, and even then, those were like 3-4 lines in the entire show, some of which aren't even that bad and also has some backlash from the "wokes" for other things).
The subs every show I'm watching this season have been butchered. Maybe your Japanese just isn't as good to capture the difference but it happens extremely often
I'm not disputing bad subs, but I am disputing changed subs for political reasons
Really? My Japanese is pretty good but I haven't noticed anything like that. Could you give some specific examples?
Just some recent examples, you will find mich more if you search for it. These aren't the shows I've been watching and experiencing butchered subtiles, but just about any show nowadays has terrible sub's full of zoomed brainrot slang and wrong translations.
https://news.sankakucomplex.com/2025/04/29/netflix-rewrites-animes-feminine-compliment-into-feminist-virtue-signal/
https://news.sankakucomplex.com/2025/07/09/localizers-change-virgin-to-incel-in-yofukashi-no-uta-english-subtitles/
https://news.sankakucomplex.com/2026/01/03/uma-musume-cinderella-grays-blatant-english-sub-alteration-generates-criticism/
https://news.sankakucomplex.com/2026/01/29/oshi-no-kos-english-subtitles-butchered-all-about-political-correctness/
https://news.sankakucomplex.com/2026/03/17/crunchyroll-dub-criticized-after-forcing-in-fragile-masculinity/
https://news.sankakucomplex.com/2026/05/02/babanba-banban-vampire-localization-turns-pervert-into-pedophile/
These range from valid but minor complains (Merry Christmas vs Happy Holidays, virgin vs incel) to random nitpickiness. Complaining about translating "hentai" or "lolicon" as "pedophile" in the context of an adult man at a school is just silly. It's not like Japanese words and their commonly-used English counterparts match 1:1 in meaning anyways; that's simply not how languages work.
Some of the examples also make me question how well they really know their Japanese - specifically the Oshi no Ko one. コンプライアンス may have come from the English word "compliance" but just translating it as "compliance" would be silly and incorrect; it means more than that in Japanese. Far too much to fit in the subtitles here without it sounding unnatural. See this document for some details. Honestly I think "political correctness", while not quite the same thing, fits the spirit way better than the English word "compliance" would and I'm not sure how better to put it.
terrible sub’s full of zoomed brainrot slang
I assure you the teenagers in Japan also use slang, as do their manga counterparts.
I would assume every time you hear complaints flare up again it's because there has been a new case.
It's something I oft see cited, but I can't remember the last time I saw a reasonable example that wasn't at least 5 years old.
It's not per se that I hear it flare up, I just hear about it every so often as a complaint in general with CR or when LLM translations get brought up, but rarely with any examples.
Comments sections made it feel different than flat out pirating.
Then they rating system was a pain.
animekai had commenting lol (too bad it was just killed)
It just brings sense of community to being on the app or site. Used to love it on Hulu too. Its half the fun on youtube but of course they make it difficult now.
There's a bunch of minor reasons when combined add up to "Crunchyroll is doing a worse job than free pirate sites despite having more resources.".
I cancelled my subscription when they went to Israeli ai subbing tools. Sucks since I would like to watch lots of their shows
Those shows exist outside of crunchyfucks.
Hayase. Thats all im saying
It's a shame there is no information on what caused profit falls... It would have been nice to know what's the gross revenue compared to the previous year. Same for staff costs and other operating expenses. Notably, is AI the reason for decline in profit?
I mean I stopped even checking because they pretty much just abandoned free accounts. Worst possible time given amazon has upped its anime offering big time.
The link gives me a 404.
Alternative here
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2026-05-19/crunchyroll-net-profit-drops-63-percent-to-453-million-yen/.237531
don't see the article anywhere on the site
From a different outlet: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2026-05-19/crunchyroll-japan-net-profit-drops-63-percent-to-453-million-yen/.237531
I guess it must've gotten taken down.
