At the Intersection of Anime, Manga & Games PG Connects Digital #2

we're we're actually talking about something slightly different here now which is fascinating to me it's topic that I think is great I'm very looking very much looking forward to hearing more about this is about the intersection between anime manga and games from our friends at crunchyroll who you may know as a platform for watching fantastic anime series um now uh do we have our speakers in the in the audience we've got Terry Lee and Siobhan Sullivan from crunchyroll who are gonna be giving us our next talk so let me just see if they're there here we do we do indeed fantastic welcome she's voluntary welcome thank you very much for coming to Pocket Gamer connects digital we're very happy to have you great well I'm

gonna recede into the background now and let you folks carry on if everyone if anyone has questions for you please folks pop them in the window at the bottom of the page and I'll come back at the end of your talk and help you navigate those but in the meantime over to you thank you for being with us welcome to our panel today at the intersection of anime manga and gaming my name is Siobhan Sullivan I'm the senior manager for global social media over at crunchyroll and today our featured speaker is Terry Lee who is our head of 360 and games over at crunchyroll we're gonna have a nice fireside chat with you guys I'm gonna ask Terry some questions and don't forget to add your questions in the field too so let's kick it off Terry how are you doing today this is really cool I'm not gonna lie so let's kick things off because I'm sure puts a really

interested to hear yeah to say for folks that don't know could you tell us what is crunchyroll games sure well I guess that helps to provide a little bit of background on crunch whoa as well in case folks don't know control is the largest Western platform for anime manga and related entertainment we primarily focus on focus on subscription video but we also have e-commerce merchandise games events and consumer products and we reach about 200 countries with about six million monthly users and cultural games is the newly developed games arm of control whereby we work with Asian developers and publishers to look at fantastic IP to bring over to the Western markets primarily catering towards our anime audience or anime minded audiences so we focus on games that give us either a very good reminiscence of ma IP or

follows those kind of trend lines within games yeah absolutely it's really great to see you know cultural games giving fans really what they want which is more anime and manga and so speaking of that you know could you describe in more detail Terry just you know how that overlap came to be and how crunchyroll overlaps with gaming and specifically with other broader industries sure I mean in general I think we've always seen a huge overlap between the anime audience and the games audience and we've always known that existed and for the for the duration of control that's been one of the biggest asks from our community which is you know as arm it is our mission to bring more anime related products to our audience people have often asked us about games and anime games is actually a pretty big genre in

Japan but it hasn't been broadly approached in the Western markets so for us it was the right opportunity to not only kind of evangelize that entire genre but also to bring a highly sought after segment to our audience and I think for us you know being in the the media space you know often times it is it is quite challenging to get into a completely different space such as games it is actually quite different but because we're very audience focused where unless we consider ourselves less as a pure media company as as much as a anime company and they just made a lot of sense for us to tackle all things anime so we actually are focusing a lot of efforts about figuring out the right games and the right products to bring over to the fans in the West yeah absolutely that's a really cool thing about the anime community is that there's so many subgenres within it you know folks that look like action folks that like romance and there's a game out there for every single type of family and so you know how can you know

your like love of manga or anime you know our fans like how does that boost a gamer experience how does that make you know playing our mobile games even better yeah I mean that's actually a great question I think one of the reasons we even got into this is because you know people who really like anime have a deep desire to get involved with the universe learn more about the storylines the narrative and and learn more about the character backdrops and oftentimes you know a 26-episode or even long multi season show develops one aspect a story but there's an entire universes built behind the anime IP and games is a good way to not only explore some of the often looked over elements within the anime but it starts to amplify the story and because most games these days but other mobile games are serviced around ongoing live operations there's an opportunity for the IP holder

and the developer to keep adding additional storylines so additional elements that really enhance the overall IP to the game so that in a way fans can live the kind of experience past the actual anime season and and in a lot of other cases we see animes that have multiple seasons they use in-game content as a good segue between season one and season two and so forth to sort of re-engage and constantly keep the fans kind of engaged throughout the entire experience so that there isn't a drop-off period so it kind of works really well in tandem absolutely yeah it's you know nice for a fan to get at those little nuggets of you know to fill in the world-building that the anime or the modules already set up for actually Terry could you tell us a little bit more about like collaborations is you know and how that could also you know boost a gamer's

experience when it comes to mobile gaming oh yeah that's actually one of the most interesting elements of animate games which is that you know we because of the unique place that control sits like we we see and we talk to a lot of different IP holders and a lot of different studios across the industry and so often times where we see like strong fan interest in different IPS and crossovers it's an opportunity for us to bring to the table or suggest to the IP holders specific ways to collaborate and bring unrelated IP into kind of the same game world experience now obviously not all of that is Canada right um they're not just other storylines but it's a very interesting opportunity where you know you can potentially see characters from two very different shows interact with each other in a new narrative and that's something that is largely not possible or not not easy to do the actual animation show right because they have their own storylines but you know you

can imagine a match the game or RPG game how multiply these crossover and in fact we've done a lot of this in the games that we've published you know in the in the various games that we've done including that much memorial phase a and we have summoners we've strived to help bring a lot of other anime IP into those games to kind of deliver this fully encompassing immersive experience across multiple keys yeah very cool I really love seeing collaborations because like you said it's awesome to see characters that you just would never imagined to interact like having conversations and you know it's kind of like the fangirl or the fanboys Unleashed I definitely was also really happy to see you know a collaboration with our own mascot crunchyroll he may so like you know has Terry has described there's just endless possibilities when it comes to you know how we can have different IPS yeah it's

funny because when we did the he made collaboration our mascot into some games it was it opened up with the first time this this huge aspect of our community who you know we realized we have a really strong opinion about like how he should be presented and and you know they have such a passion for it that we were like hey this is a great opportunity for us but like really understand how he made influences and impacts our user base beyond just being an image IOP on just being a mascot so it was an interesting learning opportunity well yeah yeah it was really cool having to develop her powers and her strengths in the game box relative to other characters like I have put hard to make her much stronger but you know videos get everything we wanted but that was a really great experience and does certainly highlight like how you know within the anime community there's so many different factions people that are fans individual characters series and

you know within that there's just so much potential about you know how we can deepen that experience but also have them enjoy the game and you know have a good time so I'm kind of continuing on there you know of course we've talked about the appeal of mobile gaming to the anime community but is there a desire to go beyond mobile games other kind of games certainly we've certainly thought about it you know we've explored doing games across the PC platform primarily publishing boost through Steam we've also explored console games and browser games I think today we I'm airlie focus on mobile because you know most mobile games are easier to make into free-to-play and we want the these IPS and DS anime games to reach as broad of an audience as possible because part of the goal is to bring that kind of experience to all our fans right and so you know having having that broad availability in the easy access through

the mobile devices I mean almost everyone has a mobile phone is what appeals a lot to you know to our kind of mission statement and so I think for the foreseeable future we'll probably still focus on mobile games though we will take some considerations into the other platforms a case-by-case basis ah got it yeah absolutely make sense there's a wild wild world out there a lot of lot of games devices yeah so make the anime games but I know part of your cultural games is finding you know what is the game that our audience is really going to enjoy so absolutely sounds good and then talking about cultural games a bit more in terms of differentiation um how does crenshaw games differentiate itself in this global market um a few ways I think I mean it when it comes down to in terms of like the games that we published of course you know it has a heavy lens

toward anime generous but really in terms of how we try to finish ourselves as more of a publisher or even a player to space you know a big part of what we're trying to do is stem it from the user side right and I think I probably talked about this more than any other point which is that you know when you developing a new game or you're bringing a new game from one market to the other one of the most challenging aspects is to build the right audience at fandom for that game right whether you have to do it community or through performance marketing any of these other tactics you know the the unique vantage point that crunchable has is that it already has a massive user base across our video platform and its audience is already primed for a lot of this IP so a big part of it is for us to figure out how to weave the game in narrative ly into our overall experience and now I'm not necessarily having to like educate them on exactly what does I can get right so there's already a basic seated and well

amped up and excited and so that's sort of the way that we try to reposition the way that we published a game it's less about blasting out marketing and getting people aware of the game as much as building kind of like a community experience using our great audience development mechanisms to to kind of teach the overall kind of storyline and mechanics so that fans were already familiar with the IEP can feel connected to the game and so it really changes the way that we think about publishing to be more kind of personalized a comedian tit and less I'm marketing heavy yeah absolutely obviously from the social media side of things it's been really great to see a community develop I think you know gaming communities are some of the most fascinating because they can be some of the most dedicated fans you know they go out of their way to make their own communities so it's been great you know working in social media marketing and

working with this segment and in terms of audience and how passionate they are I thought anime fans were passionate at on mobile gaming on to that and unique I I love it there they love to engage with their pose so that's fantastic to me so and then you know talking about crunch roll games and you know we've already talked about different platforms but where do you see crunchyroll games going and maybe the next five years yeah I mean I think it's still pretty early given how I knew the division is but I think you know our core tenets and a mission statement you need to bring the best ideas to our anime fans with that said I think what we've learned over the last you know a year and a half or so or really trying to get this thing off the ground and publishing the several games that we've already published is that

we've learned that not not all Western sorry not all Eastern games are readily available to the West our market in its original form and not all the more suitable right um the the Eastern player base in Japan and China have a different experience level and they have different trends that they interact their games on so a lot of times we have to sort of um I would say adjust the the way I di piece presented just a core loop of the game adjust the monetization of the game to bring it to the west all of us to say that we've learned that you know it may be more impactful in the long run if control got into more original development with some of these IPs and so our biggest goals is to work with the IKEA orders that develop some games from scratch instead of taking just an existing game and changing the language of it right we want to kind of redo the storyline redo the game mechanics so that it's it's something that the

Western players appreciate and recognize and so I think we're slowly moving towards kind of a full-blown studio instead of just in a marketer yeah but that would take some time it's gonna take some time you know that would be exciting yeah it has been really fascinating to see the differences in terms of player behavior across you know the globe and how our fans over in the West kind of you know like certain aspects of the games or care less about other aspects of the games we've definitely learned a lot and we're still learning yeah I mean like like to your point one thing that comes to mind a lot is you know as you probably know we we've published quite a few games that are from existing Japan developers that are really really good games but they often intentionally don't

really include any significant player versus player features and oftentimes that's one of the biggest features that's requested by our Western audience all is it all of us to say that every time we publish a game we take a lot of notes on what the Western fans want you know they they are very eager to also provide that kind of recommendation and so that gives us a good lens of like what differences we would apply if we were to start you know taking a deeper approach of porting these games and making enemy games yeah that's a really good point area we are pretty lucky in the sense that our fans or our users or players are vocal about what they want like they're very direct I think that's what everybody what everyone would want from a customers just to literally tell them exactly what they're looking for and so it's great that we have such a vocal audience that can get us to you know understand those mechanics of the games that we need to you know just keep

in mind when we're marketing towards that audience so yeah absolutely it's kind of cool and also just wanting to know about you know how the division got started because like as you said it's pretty new reality one day the founder and I were just looking through the overall control experience and we were just talking about all the things that we would like to bring just as fans right and we brought up games and you know he sort of said thanks for volunteering Terry and then you sort of left the room and I was like okay I guess I'm the one that has to figure out how to do it but but also is this I think it was just a natural segue right because we knew that as part of the overall experience we need we wanted to bring more of this anime ecosystem to our fans we we brand control much more than just the video business right we've

branded it as everything anime and so games the big piece is equity made sense so we started talking to a few more partners who were very involved in that space and we brought up the fact that you know we were interested in getting getting involved we just did a few test cases they became pretty successful and as a company as a leadership team we decided hey this is the direction we want to focus in and we just put that from scratch right we've pulled in people who are willing to help and do double duty like yourself right and I'm pulled them into the games division and started doing just going forcing him ahead and so today you know I think what we we've gotten to is we've proven that it's not only an interest to our fans it's also an interest to the internal group so that's why we sort of we should their focus to double down on like the future direction absolutely yeah it's been awesome to work on this team and secret internal games grow so fast so yes thanks Terry so I know we have a lot

of questions in our chat I can continue to go on but I think some folks might have some good ones for yeah absolutely but both of you thank you very much absolutely fascinating and I think you're you're right on the money there with them with connecting the worlds of anime manga and games and I think I think that kind of transmedia cross-media experience is what people are really looking for now actually the ability to continue their narratives in different formats interactive and on screen and on the page and all sorts so yeah you're absolutely right yeah we've got we've got a bunch of questions here um so I'm happy to kind of grab these from the chat window and put them to you the question that we do so an anonymous question here saying is the anime influence that you expecting games you work with based only on the art style or are you looking for you know do you expect to see in what anime manga influenced narrative is it all about the art it's definitely now I think the art

is more of a reminiscence kind of first look kind of perspective and makes people feel like it's an anime but really to to make it be to be accepted as a strong anime like game you really have to have the right character development the narrative I for us anyway anime is so much more than just the art style it's it's higher package I don't know if you have more - Ilan yeah no I mean our fans are really interested in art styles oh I think I've lost you - you're not done my little mr. cutout yeah I think you've uh you've frozen their board I'll give you a moment just to see if Q if furs even catches up with you it's really really important I'm a back you all back oh no I'm a little unstable so you guys might need to go on to the next question but essentially I was chiming in that yes art style is

very important to our fans but as Terry said really at the end of the day they're there for the characters there for the story and the the narrative that's also part of it yeah absolutely and on that note actually um when you're choosing what games are developed are you looking only for well-known IPS or are you open to starting new anime influenced game intellectual property definitely both I mean in fact as part of our kind of because this year control is getting me involved in a couple of I would consider more original ideas that are anime influenced or enemy inspired but not based on an existing manga or title and so that's an area that we want to actually explore because it is it is about kind of using games and to go sort of like a new new narrative instead of just relying on existing IP right right right and actually on that note with

existing IP I Kevin asks are there difficulties with creative freedom and expectations when making games based on an existing IP has a lot of experience here but I certainly think that this has been one of the bigger challenges of picking like a really tempo IP game and that's to be understood um I think you know the IP holders have developed and put in so much effort into crafting this IP that they're very careful about you know exactly how is represented and so every aspect of the game from art to storyline is scrutinized in a way that you know really and needs to make we need to make sure that it fits within the Canon right and she probably has a much better sense of this ya know I'm still working on the marketing side of things of course we have to make sure that our messages aren't really aligned with the wider IP but of course the challenge is is a bit

of you know Western versus Japanese marketing being significantly different when it comes to mobile um and so sometimes we just have to have little conversations with our teams just so that they understand different approaches that might be no different from what they typically see out in Japan and over in Asia but it's been cool too because we've been able to expose them to different types of you know social media marketing initiatives and events and other things like that things that they've just never seen before and once they are exposed to it they are big fans of it many times so it's been cool to see the you know Japanese marketing and Western marketing kind of come together with cultural games but yes it is a challenge you know approvals take a long time and so we are very careful and thoughtful about what we do select to put out there ya know that's interesting I can imagine that that approval is important and rightly so you know when you have a property that's much loved you want to get it right and you and people you know and the owners want to get it right so

um daniel has a question here he says talking about providing more information to the audience how effective do you feel is using animator series to flesh out game worlds and to the example he gives his with the danganronpa series where they have an anime season spitted two to one half supplying a backstory to the characters in the second installment as well as the primary an antagonist while the second half provides a continuation of the then-current storyline in the games instead of developing another installment I hope that makes sense the the core question there is about how effective anime series are at fleshing out the game worlds where the IP originates if you look at some of the more or if you look at the across the spectrum the really successful anime or anime expired games you know most of them do stem from the manga and then the enemy IP first and so by the time they get to the game a lot of Actuaries

fleshed out that being said there are several games several animes that are based on successful games like the game came out for his date build a huge audience and then the studio decided that it's worthwhile to Daniel's at that point producing anime to flesh out the stories that the game itself may not cover especially some of the side characters and so I think it certainly can be useful we just don't see it that often but it's certainly doable it's been proven that can be done at least in Japan and so we're looking at doing some of the same things in the u.s. right right right I'm wonderful we actually you know we've got a few minutes left and we've got we've got more questions people are still asking so I'll haul them I'll carry on so anime and manga is seen as a niche not mainstream perhaps by some people but it has been everlasting it's very successful and the fans a very passionate very demanding so what are the main aspects that you realize you need to be careful about when choosing the best games for your audience yeah that's actually something that we we've

discussed internally quite often you know I think when we first started the division that we were focused primarily on what eyepiece hit home the most with our fans but over time we've really narrowed it down to you know it's gotta be a really good game in itself like the core loop the overarching experience independent like he just has to be really everlasting and fun to play and so we I think the day we still consider our efforts kind of the game's first like a second jovan you might have more to add to that as well ya know absolutely has been really amazing to see how you know anime has continued to rise in terms of popularity and as becoming less neish but at the same time like Terry said you know our fans love the IP that's going to draw them in but what's gonna entertain them and keep them playing and enjoying the experience is truly the game mechanics you know it's awesome to see how fans

have you know built these communities and these worlds just based on the content from the games but certainly at the end of the day you know beyond just the characters and the narrative they have to have a good time and so crunch roll games specifically does take a lot of thoughtful care and consideration when looking at the actual aspects of the game itself and how we can maybe you know look and understand you know what do we want to promote more or less what do we need to maybe illustrate to our audience more clearly so that they understand and how to enjoy it more so it's pretty complex that's for sure but I'm you know excited to see more and more people on my commute well back when I could commute playing anime games on their phones you know people maybe that I wouldn't expect you know so it's cool to see how you know anime has continued to just become more and more mainstream absolutely absolutely

we're almost at the end of time we've got a couple of questions left I'm gonna just skip here and squeeze a question I'm sorry if I don't get to so everyone is asked a question we're just a little bit of short of time now but um we've got a question here that says how does crunchyroll see the primary opportunity in publishing games is it another revenue stream or is it primarily another channel to promote or country crunchyroll subscription for instances is it about marketing or money generation what's the what's the the primary opportunity here to be quite honest when we first started this process the big part of it was was legitimately to just provide a more holistic experience to our fans we just didn't know how they were going to receive the games right and you know a big part of it was to figure out like how does the game experience match the enemy experience I think in the last year and a half after we we've seen some of the initial learnings you know are for looking goals are probably twofold one is to develop games into a pretty

viable kind of revenue pillar for the company right it has to be a pretty substantial division what we're able to invest into original projects and new IPs and the second is really to sort of cultivate a broader experience with the IP folders and overall landscape back in Japan right like control has gotten involved quite a bit into working with IPS from scratch investing with anime working with studios and this adds another layer that you want to work with not just the anime rights but also merchandise raise the game rights so it's much more about a holistic experience more so than the individual crucial grand itself yeah now that makes sense absolutely absolutely look unfortunately we're gonna have to stop there because we're out of time now we did have another question there and what I'm gonna suggest is that if anyone has questions maybe they look you up in the meeting platform that we have and maybe send you some questions

through there but I want to give a round of applause you're gonna have to imagine it coming from everyone else in the room thank you very much she volunteered at fantastic we've been looking forward to that talking often and really appreciate it thank you very much for your time and for bringing that to us today thank you for having us