Anime Predictions for 2025

Ahoy, there be waters of inflection ahead!

This is it. Next year is going to be the year. Everything in anime isn’t going to change overnight, but this will be a year we can point back to as the origin of major directional changes. What do I mean by that? I mean that 2025 is going to be an inflection point of where anime both comes together and splits apart.

Coming together is the convergence of different parts of the anime industry.

Splitting apart is the further fragmentation we’ve already seen in other sectors of entertainment, now transposed on anime.

Here, I have ten predictions for how anime is going to massively change in 2025.

1. Crunchyroll will hit 25 million paid subscribers globally.
   Extrapolating the latest 15 million subscribers number that Crunchyroll announced in August 2024, I believe that Crunchyroll will hit the coveted 25 million subs number in 2025 from two sources: emerging markets and PlayStation Network. For emerging markets, I see the growth coming from India and Southeast Asia with a substantially smaller average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) on average than the United States. Note that the current price of Crunchyroll in these territories is currently around one U.S. Dollar, so what’s going to fuel growth for an already cheap price is Crunchyroll buying “acquisitive” titles (e.g. new anime that drive signups… think exclusive big budget, action titles) and going big on strategic bundles and promotions that leverage Sony’s historic relationships in region. Remember that Crunchyroll has traditionally not invested in Asia due to entrenched players, limited ROI, and a focus on the West, so it’s going to be playing catch up there. On the PlayStation Network front, I see this as Sony’s trump card even in mature markets. Including or offering some version of the Crunchyroll subscription with PlayStation Plus, which boasts nearly 50 million paying members, will unlock millions of more subscribers in high ARPPU territories, so it’s inevitable this happens in 2025.

2. Anime gaming revenue will be bigger than ever.
   Like my friends at

   A16Z GAMES
   wrote, anime is eating the world, and nowhere is that more seen than in gaming. I predict that anime revenue in gaming is going to be bigger than ever. One of the easiest measures of this will be looking at Bandai Namco’s net sales, which are forecast to increase to 1.15 trillion Japanese Yen for the fiscal ending in March 2025 (anime games are one of their biggest segments). And beyond Bandai Namco, we are going to see more entrants and more games, both in Japan and abroad. So we can level set on what we mean by “anime gaming,” I’m breaking it out into three sub-categories: a) games directly tied (from a licensing and marketing standpoint) to anime (e.g. Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, b) games based on a manga uncoupled from an anime adaptation (e.g. Fitness Boxing Fist of the North Star), and c) anime-inspired games (e.g. Arcknights). The Association of Japanese Animations annual report is definitely not counting the latter two categories, and from what I can tell, only partially counting the first category, so separate from this prediction, let’s look at properly measuring these three categories so we can see how we did come next year.

3. A streamer for “next tier” anime will emerge.
   A trend of 2024 that continues into 2025 is that the “next tier” of anime titles — that is, neither the top tier of action titles (e.g. One Piece), not the top tier of other breakouts (e.g. Oshi no Ko), are getting licensed by the streamers with any kind of minimum guarantee (MG) confidence. That is, budgets have tightened around the industry, and the glory days of even a “B” show getting high five figures U.S. Dollars MG per episode are gone. Moreover, because the production committees behind Japanese anime operate on a consensus culture and strongly prefer to de-risk rather than play the upside royalty game, they aren’t set up to do distribution deals with streamers and push the titles up the ranks themselves via direct social marketing. This will provide an opportunity for most likely a Japanese player — a domestic operator of anime streaming, an advertising company, a trading company, or affiliate of a publisher themselves — to “scoop up” a large amount of anime titles that are passed on by the incumbents. It’s also possible that a foreign player does this, but if so, I see them being taken to the cleaners on MGs as the most likely scenario. Do not look for a player such as Amazon, Apple, Max, Peacock, or Paramount to scoop up the B titles as they are neither set up for fast localization nor are a massive portfolio of B titles be something they would even go for. This may sound a little bit like Anime Consortium Japan launching Daisuki, but in this case I think it will have a more centralized power structure and not chase the white whales of the big shonen exclusives that never materialize.

4. The creator economy and anime will finally start to converge.
   I’ve written before how Japanese intellectual property (IP) is takaramono (treasure), and must be respected, but also fans who love these IPs, especially outside Japan, want to get their hands on it and have some fun. While I predicted a year ago that the first big public moves would happen in 2024 (and some things have happened behind the scenes), they’re happening in 2025.

5. Merchandise innovation will be led by boutique shops.
   I’ve spoken at length with Japanese IP owners about the dynamics of merchandise in the U.S. market. The holy land for an anime IP owner is to reach Hot Topic, a chain of pop culture retail stores (often in shopping malls) that have been around since the late 1980s. Hot Topic is an incredible retailer and has fueled millions of dollars (sometimes even lots more) to anime IP owners via their licensees for years, providing a key source of income. But the problem with planning your business around a single chain is the only have so many slots for titles, and with a cyclical market, all retailers in general (not just Hot Topic) have refocus at times for evergreen IPs. At the same time, you have also seen many “omni category” licensees that make just about everything that can take an anime franchise and turn it into a product. I have lots of friends at these places, but the dynamic you eventually reach is this: a large number of Japanese IP owners go to a small number of omni category merchandise licensees to try and get into a single chain. While Hot Topic will continue to thrive and be a great place for anime merchandise, we are going to see the true innovation in boutiques that focus on single categories. These boutiques will start with a single physical store or sometimes be online only, develop a strong brand and community, and in many ways be the “Supreme of anime ______” (you name it). Look for more of these to pop up and rise in 2025 and even become household names in the anime community.

6. VTubers and generative AI will siphon away the low end of anime.
   The “low end” of anime (not to be confused with the “next tier” as I call it in Prediction #3) is going to disintegrate over these next years, meaning less anime is going to get made. Part of it will be streamers not overpaying (or even allowing these titles into their ecosystems to earn a revenue share), but part of it is going to be that alternatives are going to be “good enough” for a large number of consumers (a classic Innovator’s Dilemma scenario). I love my high-end, high-budget, long-cycle anime just as much as any purist, but there are going to be people for who these replacements are going to work for now, and then will just get better and better. And with that, the lowest tier of anime, which historically have relied on extreme ARPPUs to stay viable (going back to the packaged video days where DVD box sets were in the hundreds of dollars!), are ripe for displacement. Consider that the profile of these titles is typically airing late at night, often on a smaller broadcaster, in the moe genre, and having some degree of one-sided exploitative relationship between the fan and the content. This value exchange may be interesting to some VTubers, and it certainly will be interesting to AI content creators, especially those of AI agents. Consider the depth a fan can go in either of those spaces, even if the fidelity of graphics (imperfect rigs, text-based chat, or even hallucinogenic imagery) is not as “good” as hand-drawn anime. For clarity, I think VTubing is awesome (I executive produced Netflix’s first VTuber and have plenty of friends who stream regularly), and what I’m predicting here is just how the dynamics of the market will work for some people. One bit of irony here is that the VTuber community is highly against the use of generative AI for artistic purposes, and while I don’t see these two trends converging so much in their overlap, I see them converging in their displacement of “low end” anime. Go figure.

7. Fans won’t care (or even notice) AI augments in anime..
   We saw some very poor attempts to execute “AI anime” in 2024, but 2025 will be the year when we see technology from companies like iKHOR and Parhelion get their tools (which are very different) put into use in actual anime production. Whereas the early narrative for the use of generative AI with anime was “this is taking jobs away, therefore it is bad” (which many industry insiders have debunked on the basis that the pool of competent anime talent is so impacted it actually wasn’t taking jobs away), what these companies are going for is that generative AI is going to enhance and help animators keep their jobs, become more productive, and make more money. We have to see how they look in finished productions, but tools from companies like these that invisibly help animators with things like coloring, cleanup, and in betweens are not going to get the same backlash as some of the things that have come out so far. A small number of fans will be mad, a few will go “oh cool,” but most won’t care or even notice, and that seems to be the current industry thought for now.

8. Anime AI agents will be massive.
   The rise of AI agents was “hot” in the tech scene in 2024. Broadly, AI agents perform tasks without human supervision/interaction, and their use cases are huge (see Microsoft’s AI agents — what they are, and how they’ll change the way we work for more). One flavor of AI agents is the AI agent with an embedded crypto wallet. Coinbase Ventures sees it as such a cornerstone of their investment thesis that the released a blog on Demystifying the Crypto x AI Stack (TL;DR: they see crypto as the driver of interoperability). But one even deeper flavor of the AI agent with an embedded crypto wallet is the anime AI agent with an embedded crypto wallet — what a mouthful! Already, Virtuals.io has built a platform for building autonomous AI agents powered by tokens on their infrastructure, and some of their most popular agents are anime-inspired characters in the “entertainment” category that can post to X on their own for starters. Beyond Virtuals, I know a number of people tinkering in this space, and the initial results are beyond expectations. It’s no secret, though, that if you ask people at an anime convention to check out your NFTs, you’re going to get some glares, so I see the most likely direction this heads long term is the “under the hood” direction where blockchain is simply a technology for connectivity and not financial speculation, but if we’ve seen anything this past quarter (and more broadly, year), there is still a retail appetite for fungible token trading. On the flip side, it’s entirely possible to build an AI agent (and anime one) without web3: imagine someone with a big enough ecosystem like Crunchyroll turning Crunchyroll Hime into an AI agent and letting her add things to your watch list, gaming with you, and even watching (and reacting to!) a new show with you. All of this can be done without crypto in a closed ecosystem, so don’t be surprised to see this sometime in 2025, though it may not happen until 2026.

9. The number of web3 players resourcing anime will increase.
   As of today, the only strongly-resourced companies at the intersection of web3 and anime are Chiru Labs/Azuki, Kasagi Labo, and KLKTN/SFT Studios. All three are aspiring to do something helpful for the anime industry in one way or another. There are other upstarts, but in terms of the level of venture capital, private equity, protocol grants, and/or other resources, it has only been these three (and I am not counting companies that are more broadly playing in content in this number). What I see is that with the explosion of generative AI (which the near entity of web3 industry sees as the best vector for its future), this number will go way up in 2025. Note that what these companies achieve in 2025 is beyond the scope of this prediction, for I am simply predicting the number of companies will go up.

10. Official AI dataset training deals for anime will finally happen.
    Following huge deals in the West like Lionsgate with Runway, we are going to see the first dataset training deals for anime in 2025. The scopes to start will be small, but they will grow over time as long as they are done in a way that respects that the Japanese intellectual property (IP) is takaramono. Look for these to be smaller deals on smaller titles to start, especially in 2025.

Looking to 2025

When I look to 2025, I think of myself in the 2030s, looking back at all the things set in motion for anime in 2025. The convergence of anime and gaming. Generative AI. Changes in distribution. Though it may not all be good, the job of a weatherman is not to predict sunny skies, but to predict all that comes.

Here’s to a strong year ahead for our industry! What do you think is going to happen?