NYCC: Crunchyroll’s Terry Li Discusses Anime Games & Crunchyroll Subscriber Benefits

One of the goals we gave ourselves was trying to figure out how to curate the titles to appeal to a broader audience, maybe female players, maybe younger players, maybe older, more casual players. So that was sort of our guiding principle going in.

And the second piece for games as a whole is we want to try to find titles that are also anime-inspired or adjacent, because games is an interesting way to introduce and cross-collateralize the fandom across games and cross anime … I think we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from our fans about figuring out how to incorporate more casual genres, like visual novels, that are easier to consume on a mobile device. 

We’re diving into that area trying to figure out how can we bring some classic, really strong animated visual novels or anime-adjacent visual novels into our portfolio.

For casual games, there’s a title called InBento, which is basically figuring out how to build your bento box. That is something that we’ve seen a lot of pickup for. We have another casual title called Behind the Frame.

We were trying to bring a lot more casual titles in so that a lot of the fans who are, to your point, not hardcore gamers, they can easily pick up, spend a couple hours and be like, ‘Oh, this is really fun,’ and then move on to the next title. So that’s been our big focus, and then obviously having a more seamless way for them to transition from the show into the [game] title.

So we’re trying to figure out how to incorporate suggestions into basically their overall app experience when they’re scrolling through the control app. We’re trying to figure out how to infuse promotions of Game Vault in there so that it’s more seamless as opposed to them having to go online and figure it out. 

We have a lot of discussions going on, but because the nature of a lot of these titles is that we’re discussing them as they come out in other territories, maybe Japan, and we look at the performance to see does it make sense to bring to the U.S., it tends to be a three or four month crunch and then the title comes out. So as of right now, I can honestly say that I don’t have anything between now and the end of the year that you haven’t mentioned already. 

That’s a tough question that we wrestle with because for us, while every individual game is important, the overall anime fandom is also important. And maybe unlike a traditional game studio, our number one focus is not on just the community for this one game, right? We are trying to figure out ‘How do I straddle the fandom for Street Fighter, the fandom for The Eminence in Shadow, or the fandom for some of our other titles and figure out do that, but also pull you into this broader anime games ecosystem?’

We’re still trying to source that out. We’re always talking to our partners on the community side. We talk to Discord, we talk to Twitch, we talk to all these different groups to say, ‘What can we do that is a little bit more unique to our situation of having groups that fold into a larger group potentially and fold that in?’ I think that’s been a little bit trickier, because not everybody who plays a game is an anime fan, and not every anime fan plays games. So you don’t want to necessarily assume that, ‘Oh, if you like this, I’m just going to bring you to the broader anime community.’ You’re trying to almost influence bidirectionally.

There are a couple of things we look at. The big titles every season are easy because we follow the industry pretty closely. We have regal relationships with our partners, so that’s something that we always endeavor to pick up, barring competition. I think for the rest of the field, what we try to look at is whether or not it adds value to a particular segment of our viewer base.

So it goes back to asking can we bring in enough shows that satisfy a certain segment of viewers? Let’s say if you watch [certain] titles, what are ones that are thematically more similar that we can recommend to you based on that? And let’s say if you don’t watch it, then what are the alternative shows that we can figure out how to get you started onto anime?

So there’s a lot of, I would say, content evaluation of the writers, the themes, and the art style to make sure that it fits within our audience. So I say that as a complicated mechanism, but really we have a big team of experts in Japan that we look at this. And truth be told, we generally try to pick up a majority of everything that comes out of Japan. It’s really about the way we surface it to our fans and not whether or not we try to pick it up.

One of the big focuses for us recently, and heading into the future, is to create more benefits for our subscribers in these other areas. For example, Game Vault itself is already specifically for our subscribers, right? But can we add stronger titles, bigger, deeper titles into that? Even for our free-to-play games? We want to start structuring our game publishing business whereby if you are a fan of Crunchyroll and you authenticate, there’s a bunch of free stuff for you every day in the game.

For our merch, we want to figure out a way to provide maybe first looks or first limited-edition products or limited supply products to our fans for us is a priority. So a big focus for us is how do we reward our fans more and get them to engage deeper and provide more subscriber benefits across the overall flywheel, as we call it.