For anime fans, this is dire news, and not anything brand-new, but people are starting to talk about it more openly on social media now, and making YouTube rant videos about it.

I got an email two days ago about the Crunchyroll Store (which years ago bought out Right Stuf Anime, the usual go-to for anime DVDs, Blu-ray, and merch). The store is being revamped to be made exclusively available to the top-two tiers of Crunchyroll’s streaming subscription plans, the Mega Fan and Ultimate Fan. Here’s exactly what the email said:

This August, we are transitioning the Crunchyroll Store to a brand-new shopping experience that will be available exclusively for Mega and Ultimate Fans. Mega Fan and Ultimate Fan memberships are designed to unlock even more ways to celebrate the anime you love, and this new store experience is an exciting addition to those benefits. The new store reimagines our assortment to capture the excitement of convention-exclusive merchandise—collectibles, curated drops, and limited-release products inspired by the anime series you love. As we prepare for this next chapter, here are a few important things to know:

In August, Mega Fan and Ultimate Fan members will have the ability to purchase curated, exclusive products from the new Crunchyroll Store. Shipping benefits for Mega Fan and Ultimate Fan members remain the same. Existing benefits for store discounts available with Mega Fan and Ultimate Fan memberships will end on August 14, 2026, as we transition to this new member-exclusive store experience. All open orders will continue to ship as normal.

But before the new experience launches, we’re celebrating with a Summer Sale—with items across the store at up to 50% off beginning July 14. We’ll be sharing more soon, including upcoming releases and details on the new store experience. Thank you for being part of the Crunchyroll community. We can’t wait to show you more of what’s next.

So, right now, I’m a Mega Fan only because I’ve participated in the Ani-May promotion of a $2.99/month charge for streaming for three months. I plan on cancelling my plan in August because after that, I can’t afford Crunchyroll. This means I’m going to lose total access to the Crunchyroll store.

Why is this a bad thing? Well, Crunchyroll has exclusive Blu-Ray editions that I can’t find anywhere else. I’ve added the Gurenn Lagann and Cyberpunk Edgerunners Blu-rays to my wishlist forever. I’d buy them sooner but they’re expensive, and now I’m just not going to be able to buy them at all unless someone resells them for an exorbitant price on Amazon Marketplace, for example, or I pay a minimum of $13.99 for at least one month just to access these goods to buy.

I watched a couple angry YouTube videos about this. What’s disturbing is that this might be signaling a moving away from physical media–the bread and butter of anime fans. Sony announced it was doing away with physical media for its PlayStation, and Sony owns Crunchyroll…so people think this move to “exclusivity” may be Sony’s own way of decreasing availability and production of physical media for its anime series and films. Which, is horrifying if true. We are moving further and further into a world where everything is streamed, a subscription, and nobody owns anything anymore.

I buy DVDs and Blu-rays of all of my anime. If it’s a keeper, I buy it, because I know that any day now, the anime series I love will be pulled from streaming and be completely unavailable. This happened with Noragami–which, thankfully, I own, because it’s no longer available to stream. There are quite a few shows that I own or want to own that have completely disappeared from streaming.

If the Crunchyroll store is making things exclusive to its top-tier subscribers in order to only produce limited quantities of a series or film, then availability is going to be an issue. Piracy will increase. So will price-gauging these “limited editions.”

If Crunchyroll is truly trying to downsize its physical media production, it will piss of so many fans. Anime fans are a huge reason why physical media still exists.

I want to close out this little post with Polygon‘s closing statement about the situation:

Anime didn’t become a global phenomenon because companies found more ways to charge the people who were already here. It grew because the industry spent years making the medium easier to discover, easier to watch, and easier to fall in love with. If even buying a figure or a Blu-ray starts to require another subscription, that’s not just a storefront redesign. It’s another step toward a future where being an anime fan means paying for access before you’ve bought a single thing, and that’s a future that feels far less exciting than any limited-edition drop ever could.

I’m pretty unhappy with this turn of events, and I feel like I need to rush to get my Blu-rays ASAP, but, alas, I don’t have the money for them. Now this new storefront rollout will make it even harder for me to get them.

Way to make things more inaccessible, Sony!