Crunchyroll's net profit for the fiscal year ending 2025 was 453 million yen (~$2.9 million), as published in Japan's Official Gazette (and reported by
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.
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
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).
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.
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:
And possibly a myriad others. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Crunchy mentioned in a positive way.
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.
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 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
Really? My Japanese is pretty good but I haven’t noticed anything like that. Could you give some specific examples?
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).
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)
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.”.