It’s been a yearlong wait, but Funimation will finally shut down on April 2nd.
Sony announced that it would merge Funimation and Crunchyroll after acquiring the latter service in 2021.
Presumably, prior licensing agreements and a technically difficult merging process kept Funimation on life support.
But the grace period has ended, and Funimation is now alerting customers of the April 2nd shutdown.
Funimation’s pricing differs from that of Crunchyroll.
For reference, the cheapest Crunchyroll plan costs $7.99 a month.
We appreciate your understanding and encourage you to explore the extensive anime library available on Crunchyroll."
This merger also marks the end of Funimation’s “digital copies” system.
In the past, Funimation members could redeem digital copies of associated DVDs or Blu-ray discs.
It’s a stark reminder that “digital ownership” isn’t real ownership.
But the “forever” policy may have encouraged customers to buy physical mediaandcommit to the Funimation service.
Those who spentextramoney because of this policy are understandably upset.
This is just the latest example of digital ownership’s downsides.
Last year, PlayStation announced that it would remove all Discovery-owned content purchases from users' libraries.
PlayStationreversed the decisionafter forming a new licensing agreement with Discovery.
All Funimation accounts will be automatically transferred to Crunchyroll on April 2nd.
In any case, you should manually transfer your account before the cutoff date.
Simply log into Crunchyroll using your Funimation credentials.
You’ll need tocontact Crunchyrollif your two accounts use different emails.
