CrunchyRoll Games is a parasite in the gacha community

By Sefhi | Published: Apr 12, 2025 | Updated: Mar 29, 2026

About this article

I’ve always had the same opinion about Crunchyroll; they are parasites on every industry they get into and provide no real value whatsoever.

Even though I would love to talk about their company and how they started as a piracy website and then transitioned into bullies trying to kill every other site doing the same as them, today’s article is going to focus on Crunchyroll Games instead.

This is their branch to publish games, both free to play and one time purchases. The first one will be today’s topic, since that’s where they publish all their gacha games.

As you can see by the length of this page, they have published and killed A LOT of games through the years, and this page will remain here to keep track of all the IPs they have destroyed and how they only care about making a quick bag.

2026 onwards

I have not updated this article with the games released during 2026. Any information you feel should be included, please dm me on discord (sefhi).

All that said, let’s dive directly into the best publisher in the gacha space:

2018

The first ever game published by Crunchyroll (CR from now on).

This title was launched in Mar 2018 under CR and sadly there’s barely any information available nowadays about it, since they have deleted all social media accounts, so it’s pretty hard finding anything.

Right after the global launch, there were some controversies because censorship compared to the other versions of the game, letting people experience for the first time how CR would manage their games in the upcoming years.

If you prefer to read about it instead of watching a video, here’s a Twitter thread.

Following this, the first year of the game was pretty quiet with some nice collaborations with other popular anime IPs until June 2019, when the developers decided to take the game away from CR without giving a clear explanation as to why.

Update: since the Facebook and Twitter pages were removed, this post can’t be accessed anymore.

After the publisher started handling the game, they survived for another 5 years until December 2023 when they announced end of service.

Published by CR Games in November 2018, yet another title that’s impossible to find good information on.

As you can see by the timeline, CR never bothers to do promotions on most of their games unless it starts making money first, which is an awful practice since most of these games are usually niche making it even harder for them to grow.

In October 2020, Ambition, the developer for the game takes back full publishing rights, no information as to why this change happened.

Like most games on this list that leave CR, they’re still alive, updating the game frequently and actually doing marketing even if the community around the title is rather small.

2019

Another title that was quite hard to find any information on, but it was yet another popular IP cashgrab they barely made efforts to even promote.

Game officially launched in August 2019 and ended service in March 2021 after barely getting any updates.

You would think a publisher’s job is to actually market the game and bring it to a new audience, but I guess CR has a different mission.

The game was launched in September 2019 for both iOS and Android platforms. Looking at the gameplay, I can’t say I’m surprised the game was closed.

Within less than a year, in June 2020, the game announced end of service. Since they deleted all the accounts related to the game, it’s really hard to find any information or articles about it.

Even on their website, I can only find a single article when the game was initially announced.

The global version for Last Cloudia was released under CR in November 2019, and the community was not happy from the get-go since the game was poorly managed and monetization was changed compared to the Japanese version.

Take into consideration, this was less than 2 years after their first published game, and they were already hated for their practices.

After multiple controversies regarding CR management with the game, Aidis took the game back and self-published the global version.

You will see this on a lot of games, but the only titles that managed to survive on this list, are those who self-published or separated from Crunchyroll.

2020

Pre-registration for the game was announced in July 2019 and the game released officially on January 2020 under CR Games.

Once again, I’m not trying to repeat myself, but CR did zero promotions on this title, leading to another fast end of service in March 2021, barely a year after releasing the game.

From what I can find, on their own website, they did two articles. One for pre-registration and another one for the launch of the game.

Game published in March 2020 and based in the popular IP of Naruto. If you have played any anime gacha games, you know how they end up.

Even if Crunchyroll was the publisher, they literally made no efforts to market the game, promote it or do anything other than a couple articles on their website and (literally) 10 tweets over 20+ months.

In October 2021, the game announced end of service and deleted all available social media pages related to the game.

My personal reason to really dislike CR. Every Overlord gacha is published by them, and they always make them worse than the original versions in terms of monetization and gameplay.

The game was announced to be published by CR in March 2020, and in less than a year, they announced end of service in just February 2021.

The game is not only still alive in JP and doing well as a niche IP anime gacha, but gets collaborations with other IPs consistently, such as:

Date a Live III
The Rising of the Shield Hero
Konosuba
Slayers
Re:Zero
Youjo Senki
Berserk
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Detonation

And many, many more.

The game was launched in September 2020 and shows even more CR practices and how they treat their employees.

News came out about how they paid their VAs $1 per line. You can find multiple Twitter threads about this.

As a developer myself I understand that sometimes budget can be tight, even more so as a freelance or solo gamedev, but if you can’t afford to pay professional VAs, then most likely your game should not be voiced on launch and wait until you make money.

You only hurt the whole VA freelance community by running the prices down this much.

As usual, CR did no promotion for the game or made any attempts at having an online community, leading to a pretty fast end of service announcement in March 2021.

2021

We’ve reached the point where CR got the most hate and even to this day people keep mentioning it.

Global version was announced in December 2020 and launched in March 2021, with initial feedback being super positive, since Priconne is a popular IP in Japan and known to be pretty f2p friendly.

The initial announcement had some censorship, and people were quickly to point out how CR does that on a lot of their games.

After that, for almost 2 years it looked like this was the game that was going to save Crunchyroll reputation and everyone was, for the most part, pretty happy.

On March 30, 2023, CR publishes an article on their blog titled “What Happens When a Game You Love Goes Away?”.

Not kidding you, just a day later, they announce the end of service of Priconne on Twitter. ONE DAY BEFORE APRIL’S FOOL.

After this announcement, people created a change.org campaign to try to stop the impending doom coming to the global server, raking more than 8,000 signatures but ending up being futile.

In March 2024, to finish things off, exactly one year after closing the game, they wished Happy Birthday to Pecorine (main character) as if nothing happened, making everyone pretty angry.

Before we move into the next game, I want to say that Cygames (developer of the game) is known for closing global servers of a lot of their games, so most likely they were also involved on this and it’s not fully CR fault.

Don’t confuse this last paragraph with me justifying anything they’ve done. Fuck Crunchyroll.

I’m going to be honest, I can see why this one died so fast. Gameplay is awful (match-3 style) and the game was published in May 2021 without any press / marketing.

Even if you try to find articles in Google, you will only find a couple of them available.

Even Crunchyroll themselves published just one article about the game, which says a lot on how they handle games as a publisher.

Neither CR nor the developer did any promotion or effort to help the game grow a community, since checking their Twitter they had zero interactions on most of their posts.

In February 2022, the game announced end of service.

The game was announced in May 2021, and even if it was a niche title, they had a good community and usually the conversations online around the game were positive.

Sadly the parent company decided to focus all their efforts on their next title which you have probably heard about, Memento Mori (the mp3 playlist rather than game).

I recommend you listen to Outcry, Asking for the Moon and Falling Down. The music of this game it’s amazing. Thank god they decided to self-publish Memento Mori instead of using CR again.

Even if the global version lasted only 2 years, the original title lasted 5 years, announcing end of service in January 2023.

This one was initially published by Sony in May 2021, which later went on to buy Funimation which also happened to buy Crunchyroll, but that’s a story for another day.

In June 2021, a month after release, they added a character named Endeavor which was a lot weaker compared to the same character in the Asian version of the game, so players complained and started doing mass refunds for false advertisement.

How did the company answer? They said the changes are intended, and they would be banning everyone abusing their refund system, calling it “malicious refunds”.

In September 2021 a Reddit user compiled multiple dark patterns / practices in the game, including $100 packs for 2 multis, more than 5 banners with different types of currencies and pity at 100 but not transferring between each banner type.

In April 2022, the game “officially” changed publisher to CR games.

Between the dramas involving this title and people disliking both Sony and Crunchyroll, the game saw a huge drop in players and revenue, surviving until February 2025 when they announced end of service.

2022

This is the most interesting case in the CR Games portfolio if I’m honest. The game was originally release in 2014 by another company called Cherry Credits but later was bought by our favourite publisher, and they released it as a new game in 2022.

You can still find the wiki for the original game here.

This is the only game purely owned by CR and I assume they don’t want to close it down because their reputation would take a hit, but they don’t have any to begin with, so god knows why it’s still around while not getting updated.

The game is still alive nowadays, and you can check their latests post on Twitter.

Again, I have no idea how this game is not getting axed considering their social media presence and even the amount of downloads the game has after so many years (100k).

The game was released in November 2022 with initial positive feedback (I would say most gachas get good reviews initially tho, considering it’s the honeymoon phase).

Just a month after release, they had an event with not 1, but 2 premium shops where prices were increased by 40% compared to the Japanese server.

In November 2023 they ran a Black Friday sale where you had to spend $800 to get a guaranteed unit. To be fair I buy gacha skins in NIKKE so not like I can complain about predatory practices.

This title is still alive nowadays and maintains a good but small community, mostly fans from the original IP that want to see more of their favourite characters.

2023

The game was published in February 2023, and had a lot of funny stuff going on from the beginning.

To begin with, they sold a Chun Li package that guaranteed the character with its EX move, later said it was a “translation error”, removing the EX move from the text and offered no compensation for it to the people who bought the pack expecting said EX move.

After that, the first collaboration was Ken as Monster Hunter, where they changed the required amount of pulls you needed to do in order to get your first copy from 10 pulls on the gacha to 60, making it impossible for f2p to acquire the character unless they spent money.

There were a bunch of different controversies after this on other events, changes in monetization and how bad the game was unless you spent money.

It reached a point where the /r/gachagaming subreddit was getting a weekly thread about all the new dramas going on with the game. Fun times honestly.

In March 2023 CR expressed no interest in improving monetization or adding changes / quality of life from the CN version.

Even after all the initial drama, the Street Fighter IP is strong enough to keep the game alive.

2024

This game was announced first on IGN which at least show some level of marketing by CR this time and was received with… mixed opinions.

A lot of people love this IP but since it was announced in IGN, they were not expecting a gacha game, which lead to negative discussions about the trailer, and you can still see in the comments.

The game was launched in February 2024, launching without guest accounts and having a reroll banner with paid only currency (where you had to pay, MINIMUM, $60 bucks). This made reroll almost impossible for normal users that didn’t want to pay.

To fix the initial drama of this banner, game issues and people not expecting the game to be a gacha, CR decided to give free currency in-game.

Only to their Crunchyroll Premium subscribers. If you didn’t subscribe to CR, then you got all the initial issues and no compensation. Lol, lmao even.

This game announced end of service in January 2026.

The game was launched in October 2024 and actually shows the new strategy Crunchyroll Games is using for their new releases.

Pick a game that is dead on China already, buy the rights to publish globally, change the monetization A LOT from the original version and make as much money as possible on the first couple months before closing it.

Rinse and repeat.

Overlord is one of my favorite IPs and I was playing the Chinese version of this game since release, so color me surprised when global came out and everything was changed:

Removed a free Shalltear character, including cosmetics with skin and a frame and made it paid only
1,000 “free pulls” announced on their Twitter was a banner with 0,03% chances giving mostly useless resources, not the actual standard gacha banner
If you have CR Premium, you get daily free stuff, including pulling currency
Initial rewards were nerfed heavily
Lifetime monthly card wasn’t on the CN version of the game, among other packs / monetization changes
A lot of extra rewards for CR premium users you can’t get in different shops that are unavailable for f2p players
Day 1 bugs from CN were still present on the global release (frozen screen in tutorial)
You need to pay to make a guild (lol)

The game is still alive but I expect it to be closed within a year considering everything Crunchyroll has done in the past.

2025

Exactly the same situation as Lord of Nazarick. A Chinese game (Millennium ELF Tour) that was abandoned, and they bought the rights to publish globally.

The title was released in March 2025 after zero promotions or pre-registration events, while the original version was released in 2021 only on CN app stores.

This game was killed in China so the events CR can make for this title are literally counted unless they start creating new content, which let’s be honest here, they’re not doing.

Update 2026/03/22: The game announced EoS in February 2026 on their official twitter, as expected.

In November 2025 Bleach: Soul Resonance was released under their normal Crunchyroll Games branch.

Not a lot of dramas when it comes to this game and still alive at the time of updating this guide (March 2026).

The crunchyroll experience

Barely any marketing for their games on already niche titles (nowadays this has gotten a bit better looks like)
Always worse monetization model compared to the original versions so they can shill CR Premium and sell more packs
Always worse rewards for F2P players compared to the original versions so they can, once again, shill CR Premium and sell more packs
Ignore complaints from players if there’s any drama
Remove all social media when they EoS games and never make offline versions of their titles

They have been publishing games since 2018 and to this day, the only game with a good reputation was Priconne until they killed it, which is something I have not seen on any other gacha publisher.

So… why does this matter at all?

We should always strive as a community to improve the games we play and make them (even if just a bit) better.

We know gacha games are bad, this does not mean you should eat all the slop they give you and allow them to do as they please without any accountability.

Enjoy your gacha games, but never think these companies deserve your pity or loyalty, as you can see in this page, they will have zero hesitation to completely remove games without caring what their players think or even bothering making an offline version to keep the memories you made for months and, in some cases, years.

To finish this article, I want to mention that all the companies that give rights to CR to publish their games, they are as bad as Crunchyroll themselves.

It’s 2026 and they can do research before handing out the rights to their IPs, meaning they do know how bad it’s going to be or they simply don’t care about their games.

More than 8 years and 20 games (not counting anything released in 2026 and beyond) and only two of them are alive at the time of writing this article.