Anime Video Games: The Modern Surge and Upcoming Challenges

• Anime and video games saw a surge during the COVID pandemic.
• Both industries struggled as restrictions lifted.
• Anime faces issues like production crunch and reliance on remakes.
• Monopolies like Crunchyroll impact the anime industry.
• New hits like Frieren and Delicious in Dungeon break traditional molds.

Anime is having a modern video game boom. Now comes the hard part.

The anime industry would be wise to not repeat gaming's post-pandemic expectations.

By Isaiah Colbert

Published Tuesday 12:40 PM

Modern-day anime and the industries that shape its creation and distribution are experiencing a surge similar to video games since 2020. During the height of the COVID pandemic, everyone was stuck at home with nothing better to do than tackle their backlog of games or shows.

More people bought games or subscriptions to streaming services to watch anime. The industry rapidly expanded to meet the demand. But as restrictions lifted and people returned to their offices or schools, both industries struggled to adapt again.

The Anime Industry's Struggles

Like video games, which have seen record layoffs this year, anime has become a victim of its own success. Crunch, the production of remakes that may or may not justify their existence, long-promised titles that never see the light of day, and online discourse over flashy animation versus compelling writing have thrown the medium into disarray in the last few years.

While in many respects having too much of a good thing is still having a good thing, anime is navigating a similar boom as the gaming industry. Whether it will follow a similar path is unclear, but we do know this: it isn't sustainable.

As with gaming, anime studio mismanagement often breeds crunch that forces animators to rush out a project that could've used more time. Look no further than well-regarded studios like Mappa. Its meteoric rise as a fan-favorite studio with acclaimed shows like Jujutsu Kaisen and the final season of Attack on Titan coincided with the studio earning a reputation for enabling crunch while also canceling other long-promised projects.

Anime has the distinct advantage of a deluge of its seasonal content being adaptations of thriving weekly manga series. For years, this feedback loop has kept both industries healthy, but it has also shown signs of instability with animators and manga creators buckling under the demand to produce more content weekly.

In the best-case scenario, manga creators and animators are allotted extended hiatuses for their own health. In the worst-case scenario, they have to churn out unrefined episodes to meet the seemingly bottomless demands of their consumers. And in case of emergency, the solution to the problem of not having a new series to adapt is to redo older ones.

As with gaming, contemporary anime has gotten too comfortable weaponizing nostalgia with anime remakes like Spice and Wolf, Fruits Basket, Urusei Yatsura, Ranma, The Rose of Versailles, and Magic Knight Rayearth. While some remakes like the Neon Genesis Evangelion rebuild films justify their existence by exploring alternative narrative beats, others like Netflix and Wit Studio's anime remake for One Piece have fans scratching their heads.

When asked why they'd remake an ongoing anime that's readily available on most streaming services, Wit Studio president George Wada gave an answer not unlike the one Capcom offered to justify remaking Resident Evil 4: the technical advances of today coupled with the assertion that the anime's original format is off-putting to new viewers.

The Anime Monopoly Problem

Just like the modern games landscape, monopoly has seeped its way into the anime industry. Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard and subsequent mass layoffs of employees point to the problems that often arise when one company gobbles up others. Anime's version of that is Crunchyroll, the pirate website turned Sony-owned media conglomerate.

In the wake of its acquisition of competitor Funimation earlier this year, fans have faced the loss of their digitally-owned anime, closure of digital storefronts, and price hikes.

This becomes especially egregious when you consider that animation, like gaming, has only four major streaming services: Crunchyroll, Hidive, Netflix, and Hulu. While each has its own merits in terms of presentation and cost, these services often fail to properly promote a show or get stuck in a delayed release schedule.

Not everything is doom and gloom for anime. In a similar fashion to how SuperGiant Games' Hades revolutionized the roguelike genre, the last year of anime has seen a steady stream of smash hits like Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and Delicious in Dungeon. Their secret? Aside from being written by women, both series dare to go against the grain by not copypasting tried-and-true anime formulas.

While all of the above doesn't bode well, it also doesn't mean that anime as we know it is doomed. However, the structural parallels to the state of gaming, which is unquestionably in disarray after layoffs, are concerning. Hopefully, anime can right the ship and focus more on quality rather than quantity.

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