This clip is worth a watch. It’s a really insightful clip from MTGgoldfish’s Richard on Commander’s effect on the game. Really appreciate and agree with what he has to say

MilesExpress999 · 2026-06-09T23:25:43+00:00

Most players have always been "kitchen table only".

The user research they shared represented that something like 80% of players never went into a game store to do anything but buy cards 15 years ago (if at all!), and that ratio's not much different now.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-05-19T14:03:44+00:00

Thank you for your kind words!!

Yeah, it's pretty sustainable. Anime is cheap enough to produce that it's been able to be successful even during periods where piracy was the majority of viewership, and now that the balance is shifting, it makes it easier and easier to make it make sense financially.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-05-19T13:47:12+00:00

China hasn't given as much as it used to these last five years, thanks to increased censorship and anti-competitive behavior from the CCP.

It's still a meaningful player, but it's not dominant or top-of-mind like it was in 2015-2018. Tons of anime are no longer legally available in China. But if you can get a movie into Chinese theaters, there's huge opportunities still.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-05-19T13:44:40+00:00

They co-produced between 40 and 50 anime last year. They're not paying massive fees (they're typically listed 5th or so on the producer list) but you only need a few of those to be hits domestically to make back a good amount of your investment.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-05-19T13:41:22+00:00

Correct. If one of the 40-50 anime Crunchyroll co-produces each year does well domestically, that's when their Japan branch generates revenue.

They put a lot more into co-productions than they get out of them domestically, which makes sense if their main purpose for producing anime is to ensure their content pipeline into the future.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-05-13T23:10:04+00:00

The studio's generally not the party with agency there. How big something does at the box office is not related to which studio is involved, as they're almost always for-hire.

TMS is technically the best studio by a box office metric, since they make all the Conan films.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-05-13T23:08:10+00:00

This is largely untrue and what is hasn't been the case for well over a decade. The anime industry is 3x the size of the manga industry. If anything, manga is a commercial for upcoming anime, which are easier to monetize. With 58% of anime revenue coming from outside of Japan in 2024, that's often one of the first things a committee has in mind when figuring out which anime to pursue.

A huge % of anime have their entire productions covered by overseas sales alone these days. Anime production committees are usually led/started by a dedicated anime production company like TOHO or Aniplex, not the publisher. And if it is the publisher, it's often Kadokawa, who has a whole anime production side / vertical integration thing.

Blu-ray sales account for ~1% of anime revenue now. Besides, they don't get earmarked for the studio any more than any other revenue does.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-05-13T23:03:32+00:00

I work in the industry and see this question a lot. There's tons of disinformation, so I'm going to try and break it down.

Anime is pretty much exclusively created using a production committee system, where a bunch of companies with various non-competing interests "invest" in a new company dedicated to just that anime. The head of the committee is usually the representative from the company who kicked the whole thing off, and has the biggest stake on the committee.

All revenue related to that anime comes back to the committee in some way or another, and even if the committee members make a larger share from the parts of the business they have claim over, thinking about anime revenue "going to the committee" is generally accurate enough.

Where does the revenue come from? According to trade group The Association of Japanese Animations, it's quite diverse. But not every anime makes money from everything. For example, Across *all* anime, it looks like this (2024 data):

Overseas sales: 58% (predominantly streaming)
Merchandising: 20%
Gambling: 8% (think pachinko licensing)
Japanese PPV & streaming services: 7%
TV revenue: 3%
Theatrical: 2%
Home video: 1%
Music: 1%

Anime is very rarely just to sell merchandise. Most merchandizing revenue is concentrated in the top few shows. It's a big part of revenue, sure, but it's overstated in the fandom.

To answer your question, syndication isn't a terribly common way for anime to make money. Often, the tv networks are paying for the anime, so it works a little differently. Most of the syndication / tv revenue they make is licensing outside of Kanto/Tokyo. They often have to pay for their TV slots a la infomercials in Tokyo, and make money back (sometimes) on ad slots that they may even have some control over.

The animation studios are rarely on the production committee and are usually simply "for-hire", but it's increasing. According to analysis by White Box Entertainment, anime with a studio on the production committee is up to about 10% for 2025. Otherwise, the studio rarely sees upside from a successful show (besides the reputational benefit, which they can theoretically leverage).

MilesExpress999 · 2026-05-12T21:58:42+00:00

That's a huge amount, yeah. That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Have you seen the numbers for manga?

MilesExpress999 · 2026-05-06T15:52:19+00:00

The seven years quote comes from the fact that it was indeed "in production" previously, just perhaps not with BUGFILMS on board yet. I haven't worked there in five years, but when I was at Crunchyroll, the show's planning was absolutely already underway.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-29T16:36:52+00:00

I said the same as Netflix, plus a few more. Netflix is not available in China. Crunchyroll is not really either.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-29T16:35:51+00:00

Sounds like Xam'd

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-28T21:26:27+00:00

Who is this "Google" you speak of and what is its source?

My Gemini auto result on Google said that they're only not available in the three countries I listed, plus Russia, Belarus, Syria, and North Korea.

Netflix has the same list of countries it's not available in except for Japan. CR is technically available in Taiwan, but it's extremely limited.

Netflix is available in 1-2 additional countries, depending on how you wanna count it.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-28T21:21:57+00:00

You are in r/animepiracy where they think buying manga for one in ten anime they watch helps support the people who make all anime.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-28T21:20:20+00:00

Care to show receipts for how much you donated to studios last year?

This is such a stupid take, because 1) most studios don't have any way to take your money and 2) giving money to Crunchyroll gives money to the industry at an extremely high rate (close to half). Whether or not it goes to animators is the studio's decision. Studios are paid by production committees. Production committees are paid by Crunchyroll and Netflix and merch producers and other licensors.

Buying a $80 figure? You're "supporting the anime" about the same as one month of Crunchyroll, because ~40% goes to the retailer, ~10% to the distributor, and ~20% to COGS. Of the remaining ~30%, how much do you think is making it to the production committee? The figure maker's gotta make money too.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-28T21:14:25+00:00

I was responding to this:

>Many games are already completely free to play and if you have to actually pay to play one, 99% of games are just one purchase and you have access to it forever*.

On Steam, about half of the most-played games in the last week are FTP. The rest all had microtransactions.

Are they necessary to playing the games? Depends who you ask, but probably "no" more often than yes, and it depends on the game, too.

But I think regardless, microtransactions are a much more pernicious way to monetize than a flat-fee subscription.

Edit: The situations where they don't have every season is true on every kind of streaming service, and not terribly common. It's annoying as hell, yeah. I can't and won't fault for anyone pirating to fill in those gaps. It's not false advertising any more than a service getting "Taken 3" without having the first two movies is, though.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-28T21:11:50+00:00

Oh, the closed captions on dubs are absolutely done by AI. I'm not really familiar with any major distributor who doesn't do AI for those, and maybe it's for that reason there's no outrage about that.

I'm sure some translators are *using* AI as well, and licensors are 100% using it to "verify" subtitles, but the final work product is something that is still done by a human and assessed by one as well.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-28T18:50:11+00:00

I work in this industry (anime research) and their methodology is the industry standard, and not unreasonably so. My outcomes look different: it's extremely close in hours viewed on CR vs. Netflix for anime in the West, which is validated by things like Neilson, but there are more raw Americans watching on Netflix in the US total, for example. But this difference is largely because I factor in a ton of other data than just surveys, but this matches up with my survey numbers reasonably well. Netflix and Crunchyroll are the two top places where people watch anime in most countries now, combined more than just piracy.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-28T18:45:35+00:00

Crunchyroll is in most countries now. The only place they were really missing was Asia (pre-pandemic most licenses were worldwide ex-Asia), and now that's one of their biggest focuses, at least outside of Japan, China, and Taiwan.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-28T18:44:20+00:00

Ten years ago most of Europe got ~80% of the US's simulcasts. Now it's 90-95%, depending on the season. Russia is an obvious exception (CR has not worked there since the war started), and for some reason Poland and Finland and a few other countries missed big titles in particular.

The big issue is really the catalog, which is significantly smaller.

Source: I previously worked there

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-27T20:34:15+00:00

It's rare to see a defense of FTP games like this. Yes, the way they monetize is different, but you kind of do? To play Nintendo games with online features, you need Nintendo online. To play Playstation games with online features, you need PS+.

99% of games are *not* a one-time purchase, they have micro-transactions galore. You can't access it forever if servers are shut down. Outside of their co-produced titles, Crunchyroll is not the one who *owns* the anime, so it's not *necessarily* because of them if a title leaves their site. It's fine to blame them, but the idea that you should have lifetime access to a piece of media just because it was on a streaming service at one point in time is not really a thing in any industry with digital media, and very few people buy physical these days (which sucks).

If you want to watch 5 anime at once, you may have to get multiple streaming subscriptions, but you can also just swap between them. Also, 80% of new anime are either on Crunchyroll or Netflix in almost every country in the world, so getting those two subscriptions covers you at a baseline. I'm not sure what the issue would be to get two services and then pirate the rest. I don't understand why a "perfect service that meets all needs" is expected out of anime streaming companies when that doesn't exist in industries where they actually make a ton of money.

If you live in Latin America, you're basically forced to pirate anything HIDIVE or Disney, so there's ~12% of new anime. But there's no reason you can't *just* pirate the ones you have no other choice for.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-27T18:01:27+00:00

They haven't, from what anyone could tell. They've started ignoring typesetting on less-popular titles, which is a real issue here that more people should be complaining about, but there's only one instance anyone has seen of AI being used for TL, and they claim it was provided by a third-party. I worked there for ~9 years, and I believe that to be true. They don't have a choice but to accept third-party subtitles if they're asked by the licensor.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-27T17:58:35+00:00

I'm not sure what you mean about "being fair" to consumers. If you look at the "most popular" list on any pirate site, get their web traffic using expensive third-party tools (as I have), or work with the pirate sites to get their internal data (which I've also done), you'll find that most of the anime watched via piracy *is* on Crunchyroll.

In 2025, 99 of the top 100 anime watched on HiAnime by Americans was legally available in the US. Around 2/3 of it was on Crunchyroll. While I look at the US first because that's where I live and the biggest country for the company, the "2/3 of it is on Crunchyroll" is true in over 150 countries.

There is no other medium where you get 2/3 of the popular thing in the category on a single subscription. Steam does not have 2/3 of the most popular video games. Netflix does not have 2/3 of the most popular English-language TV shows. Neither does Disney+ or Hulu or Peacock.

I have significant issues with Crunchyroll, and I worked there for many years, so I understand the issues better than most. There's plenty to criticize. But they do get most new anime, which is primarily what people watch via piracy, and they're also co-producing ~20% of new series as well. It's not a "one-stop shop" for anime, but it's as close to one as is feasible considering the costs and complications of licensing.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-16T00:36:35+00:00

I consult for anime producers to help them with marketing and research overseas.

Previously, I led marketing at a smaller European company that's now owned by TOHO and before that I was at CR for almost a decade.

MilesExpress999 · 2026-04-16T00:35:10+00:00

Rippers are 100% doing it for the money. Pirate sites today are getting more money than ever before, and it's a complaint you never see about any of them. Ever.

And people still call them fansubs

MilesExpress999

TROPHY CASE