Funimation streaming is being rolled into Crunchyroll, but digital purchases are not going with it.

Crunchyroll is shutting down Funimation and raising its prices.

This would not be a huge deal in and of itself, since streaming services shut down all the time and it seems like most of the content will roll over, but what they are not maintaining is the digital purchase record. That means that yet again people who made digital purchases are going to lose access to them despite the fact that the company they bought them from is still a going concern. Presumably Crunchyroll could choose to leave the digital purchase infrastructure up, it just doesn't want to.

With games and more things continuing to go digital, more and more frequently with no physical alternative (such as with Alan Wake II), this is a serious problem for both consumers and industry. The issues for consumers are obvious, but for the industry they're going to reach a point where people are hesitant to make digital purchases, and that's going to be bad for business. When a company like Microsoft even makes noise about changing its Xbox operations people immediately worry about their digital purchases, and with good reason. After all Crunchyroll isn't getting out of the Anime business, it's just changing the business and shedding the purchases as part of those changes.

At this point it's clear that we need more legal protections for consumers and technical solutions to these issues (other than piracy.) If you're going to call something a digital purchase then it should be something you can own, and as we all know we don't actually own our digital purchases. We just own licenses, which can be revoked at any time.

From what I can tell, this isn't exactly affecting digital purchases, but rather physically purchases that came with a code for a digital copy back-up. I'm pretty this was just their work around for Ultra Violet stuff when Ultra Violet shut down. I mean, it's still not great if you don't have your physical version anymore. They could just pay the money to keep the Funimation stuff up or build a system to flag users for access per show on Crunchyroll, but being responsible is just so darn expensive for these humble little corporation-eating corporations.

@brian_: I don't really differentiate between a straight digital purchase and a digital/physical combo pack, though there is an irony to your digital "backup" going offline.

Even if you still have your physical version there are reasons you might want to use the digital version (such as traveling but don't want to bring discs.)

The point is that they sold these digital versions (even if they were in combo packs) and now they are taking them offline even though the company is still in business and there are lots of potential technical solutions.

@bigsocrates: Oh yeah. It's still a shitty move and continues to reinforce that you should never trust these companies to keep your stuff available for you in perpetuity. The thing that gets me about this move in particular is that some these companies go out of their way to prevent you from making your own copy but can't be bothered to pay the server fees for their own proprietary solutions.

There's already a precedence of MS taking your purchases away. When MS shut down GFWL Marketplace and rebranded it to Xbox, none of the past purchases became re-downloadable. I bought quite a number of games from them too. I foolishly predicted that because MS is a much bigger and more stable company than Valve is, my digital library would be safer with them.

Anyways, this is why I don't buy digitally from MS.

I for one can't wait for all entertainment in this country to be owned by 2-3 companies and have anything older than a few years stashed in a vault where no one can legally acquire it.

The future is easy to see. AI controlling every media that is digital. And once this is done, no, they are not going to care about preserving media and stuff people buy, if it gets in the way of their bottomline. This is why I don't mind a certain group of people existing, because they are literally going to be the only ones maintaining these things.

In the past companies would beat the competition by offering a better service to the customer, but things have gotten so insane in the digital entertainment space that publishers and rights holders don't really care about how the customer is served in the end, as long as the deal is good for them, they can even deliver their own goods on their own terms with little worry about a competing service.

I don't see any way out except legislative intervention, the only way to control the path of this trend is to tell them what they can and cannot do by law, we've had to do it in the past to keep businesses in check so i hope those talks are on the way sooner rather than later.

It might take an incident where millions of people lose access to products they believe they had ownership of and are left significantly in the lurch, a huge issue a company can't talk its way out of, but preferably before then.

Yeah this seems like something that will come to a head sooner or later because of how explicitly anti-consumer it is. Similar protections need to show up for other forms of content, including phone apps and the like too. A recent example that affected me was this: I bought the paid version a guitar tuner app for my phone several years ago. It was great. I used it a bunch. One day when I went to use it again, suddenly the app I had paid for as it had existed was gone and had been "updated". With the new update, many of the features I had paid for were behind a paywall that required a monthly subscription and I was locked out of the features I had paid for. I emailed them about it and was basically offered a free month of subscription. I just gave up and started using a real tuner again instead.