Forum - View topicNEWS: Funimation App Shuts Down on April 2 as Its Accounts Merge With Crunchyroll
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ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor
 Posts: 649 |
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And how did Funimation start? Because that’s who we are all dealing with. That fact seems to get lost a lot anymore. Funimation bought Crunchyroll, not the other way around. They chose to wear the new name, but it’s not like they got bought out and now they’re going away. They are the ones that have shuttered their own service without care for their own customers. It really shouldn’t be so easy that slapping a new name tag on is all it takes for people to wax eulogies about how Funimation was ruined by Crunchyroll when they’re literally the ones in charge now. |
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Pokenatic
 Posts: 563 Location: Neo Venezia |
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Honestly not surprised by this. Still very sad to hear though. Sony buying their way to controlling the majority of the anime market is the worst thing to happen to anime.
There's a big caveat to that though. Last year, they changed it so that the current anime and select older titles were the only ones available for free with ads. I don't know how bad it is since I've been subscribed to Crunchy for years, but I was very surprised to find out that both Bocchi and Chainsaw Man both got paywalled and got back to free with ads within the year since they premiered. It's honestly even maddening to boot, considering a lot of anime fans get into anime when they're teenagers, an age demographic not really known for having plenty of disposable income to pay for a Crunchyroll subscription. Crunchyroll's free with ads option was their ace up the sleeve, helping extend the reach of official streaming options over piracy, but they decided that neutering it to pump up short term profits is the "smarter" option apparently, long term growth be damned. |
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1123 |
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The merger between Funimatio and Crunchyroll had a big impact for Latin American anime fans, and I had to say they are moslty negative. Crunchyroll arrived first in the region around 2016, they started slow but with time they began making their own dubs into Spanish and Portuguese and for the most part they were pretty good. Funimation, on the other hand, arrived in 2020 and their arrival was met with tons of criticism, particularly due to the fact that it was just available in certain Latin American countries and that their frist major dub, the one for My Hero Academia, was met with almost universal negative reception, and sadly the dub hasn't improved that much since then. In 2021 things changed a bit, they switched to other better studios and the dubs they made for shows like Attack on Titan, Fire Force and Kaguya-sama were better received, and Funimation even began dubbing old shows that never got dubbed before like Black Butler and they also redubbed shows like Cowboy Bebop and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (FMAB redub was an improvement over the original version in my opinion). But ever since CR and Funi merged, CR has put an end to Funi's practice of dubbing old shows, the last one they did was for Soul Eater almost two years ago. Some Funimation shows were added to CR, but not all of them, FMAB being the most requested one. In my opinion, I feel that CR believe they're in a very comfortable position and they don't feel the obligation to improve, since they have very little competition in the LatAm market. I hope things can change, there's some alternatives here like Anime Onegai, or the recently announced Naisu, but they're very small compared to CR |
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mgree0032
Posts: 237 |
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RIP Funimation (1994-2024)
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23813 |
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Actually, the name that really should be being bandied about isn't either Crunchyroll or Funimation: it's Sony. They own the conglomeration that once was Funimation, Crunchyroll and other entities. The names Crunchyroll and Funimation have not really meant anything for years. They've both just been divisions of much larger corporations for ages now.
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Pokenatic
Posts: 563 Location: Neo Venezia |
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Sony is the one that bought Crunchyroll. Funimation wouldn't have the money to outright buy out Crunchyroll themselves. Sony, who already owned Funi, did. Sure, the current CEO of Crunchy is a former COO of Funimation, but he most likely still has to take cues from people higher up than him in Sony. Once Sony owned both Funimation and Crunchyroll, it was obvious some things were gonna go and some were staying and that's how we got to here. Mergers almost always leads to consolidations in some capacity. |
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Sorraffy
Posts: 159 |
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More likely they'd follow Amazon's direction and you get ads with the current pricing but if you pay more you can remove the ads |
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CostlyAxis
 Posts: 20 |
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I see some comments mentioning a price increase, but the email I received makes no mention of this and seems to indicate otherwise. It has the usual text minus any mention of prices. Even more confusingly, it has the following disclaimer text:
However, I have both a legacy Funimation account and a legacy Crunchyroll account. I have yearly subscriptions for both and they're both certainly less than the $99+ USD per year I saw thrown around. I'll have to reach out to Crunchyroll support because this is just confusing all around. Unless this is how I learn I'm losing both of my yearly subscriptions for monthly ones. |
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MFrontier
Posts: 11431 |
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The end of an era.
I just hope they really transfer everything over before they shut down. |
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KaidoYuji8Shinji
Posts: 119 Location: Manchester, NH |
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End of an era. I remember as a teen collecting the “Uncut” VHS versions of DBZ, then their botched releases, then Blue Gender, Yu Yu Hakusho… I bought so much from them. It’s sad to me…
Also I feel their NEW app was superior to the Crunchyroll one. I LOVED how they eventually replaced the simulcast with the uncut Blu-ray version. This was apparent especially with AoT.. RIP Funi.. |
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Kazemon15
 Posts: 400 |
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I doubt it. They said it will be their top priority in 2022....over 2 years ago and most of their catalog has no caption. If Funi goes down and there is no caption uploaded to the shows that move to CR, Im considering cancelling my subscription to CR. |
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penguintruth
 Posts: 8461 Location: Penguinopolis |
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This is why I collect discs. Physical media is still king.
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4586 |
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All of us are well aware of this--or rather, as Glordit and Blood- noted, we're aware that Sony is the one calling the shots, as they owned both brands and were the ones that chose how to merge them. That doesn't make it any easier to swallow, though. Glordit noted that Crunchyroll was the brand that had better name recognition internationally, and that's probably true in the grand scheme of things, but for me it was the exact opposite. By the end of the last decade, Funimation was the anime brand in the US market. They'd been around since the 90s, they survived the late-00s bubble burst when multiple competitors did not, they had the vast majority of the most popular licenses, and their founding title was the eternal cash cow DBZ, far and away the biggest mainstream hit anime has ever seen in the US. I own who knows how many of their titles at this point, and I have very positive associations with their brand as a whole. Meanwhile, Crunchyroll was that site with the dumb name that only existed because a bunch of fansub thieves made a bunch of illegal money and then somehow got rewarded for their efforts with a ton of venture capital. I can probably count on one hand how many times I visited their site before the merger, and their brand meant next to nothing to me until then. Yes, a lot of the same people are ostensibly running the show, but I hope you can see how easy it is to have a negative emotional reaction to everything that's happened when it feels like the "wrong" brand won, and all of these anti-consumer practices immediately followed.
...I didn't say this in here, did I? I'm sure I did elsewhere, because it sounds like something I'd say, but I know it wasn't in here. You had me in a bit of an existential crisis for a moment. 
Anyway, I'm as much of an old-school buy-all-the-things media hoarder as anyone, and I'll always spring for a physical copy of a series as my first option if it's available.* But as far as digital options go, I'm done playing nice. I dutifully entered every single Funi digital copy that came with one of my purchases, though I never used any of them since I'd almost always rather just pop in a disc. But now that entire library is being unceremoniously tossed in the garbage due to corporate whims? Yeah, no. If that's how they're going to play, then I have zero ethical issues with obtaining my own digital copies to watch and store as I please. This just reinforces my view that the only digital purchasing systems worth putting any sort of trust in are for PC games, because there are numerous options available that are either completely DRM-free, or else are so overwhelmingly popular and have earned enough of my collective trust that I feel confident they're not going anywhere. Nothing in the TV/movie space has come anywhere close to that. As always, it's a service problem. (*The thing is, even buying anime has lost much of its shine for me now. I used to stop by RightStuf multiple times a week, and I bought so much from them for so long that they felt like an old friend, as silly as that seems. But then Crunchyroll acquired and subsequently gutted them in favor of their FAR inferior storefront, and like everything else made an absolute mess of the whole affair. Like, I can't tell you how much worse their take on the big holiday sale was. They couldn't even manage something as basic as, y'know, saying when deals would expire. Such competence.) |
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Vanadise
 Posts: 500 |
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Don't worry, I am dealing with it. I'm not arguing with anybody here, I just want to make sure people understand the depth of how bad they are. The Japanese studios who sign with them are also equally culpable of tolerating what they claim to oppose as soon as it becomes profitable for them. I do realize that technically, Funimation is the controlling partner in their merger, but the point is that this is an anti-competitive action by a near-monopoly that was only made possible through fundamentally hypocritical business maneuvers. Hope that helps. |
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miscu
Subscriber Posts: 4 |
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The ambiguity of English dub closed captions ever getting ported over is the main annoyance for me, since those are incredibly useful for the people in my watch group who have auditory processing issues. Those represented probably thousands of hours of labor which might fall into a void after the closure.
They have the srt files. I know it's a lot of episodes to mass-adjust the line timings of (to account for the time difference the Funimation intro added), but they absolutely have the resources to do it. |
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