The Crunchyroll Anime Awards is hitting its 10-year mark this month, and honestly, that alone is a pretty big deal for anime fans. The event started in 2016 and will hold its next ceremony on May 23 at 6PM JST at the Grand Prince Hotel Takanawa in Tokyo.
On paper, this sounds like exactly what anime deserves: a proper annual awards show celebrating the best shows, creators, performances, music, animation, and fandom moments in the medium. Sony moving the ceremony from California to Japan in 2023 also made sense. If you are celebrating anime, having the event in Japan feels more respectful to the industry that actually creates most of it.
But the bigger question is whether the Crunchyroll Anime Awards is becoming anime’s version of The Game Awards, or whether it is mostly a very shiny marketing machine for Crunchyroll.
Traditional entertainment awards are not exactly in their prime right now. According to figures cited by Anime News Network, major US broadcast award shows have lost around 38% to 51% of their television audience since 2015. The Oscars, Grammys, and Golden Globes still matter, but younger audiences are clearly spending attention elsewhere.
Anime and games are the opposite story. The Game Awards grew from 2.3 million global livestreams in 2015 to 171 million in 2025. That is gila growth, and it shows how strong digital-first fan events can be when they speak to younger audiences. Anime sits in the same zone: global, online, fandom-heavy, and extremely active on social platforms.
Crunchyroll’s own numbers are massive too. The 2025 Anime Awards reportedly drew 51 million votes. That sounds like pure fan power, but there is an important detail: voting requires a Crunchyroll account. So every vote is also a sign that someone logged in, engaged with the platform, and participated inside Crunchyroll’s ecosystem.
That is why the awards are useful beyond trophies. They are also a platform engagement tool. Crunchyroll has been pushing hard into growth markets, including India, where Hindi dubbing, a Hyderabad office, and cheap subscription pricing helped bring Indian fans into the voting top ten for the first time in 2025. For SEA fans, including Malaysia, this matters because anime platforms are clearly treating Asia outside Japan as a serious growth battleground.
The issue is credibility. Crunchyroll is not a neutral industry body. It is a major streaming platform owned by Sony, and some industry voices quoted by ANN were blunt about the problem. One Japan-based entertainment editor noted that Crunchyroll is geoblocked in Japan, making the Tokyo-hosted event feel more aimed at overseas audiences than local Japanese fans. The Japanese-language broadcast, which reportedly made up around a third of watch time in 2023, was also dropped in 2024.
There are also concerns from industry people that the show feels too much like Crunchyroll branding wrapped around the entire anime medium. That perception becomes even sharper whenever non-Crunchyroll titles lose big. Delicious in Dungeon, for example, received 16 nominations but won nothing in 2025, leading some fans to question whether the awards can truly feel fair.
To be clear, the winners are not decided purely by fan voting. Since 2022, the Anime Awards has used a 70/30 split, with the jury carrying more weight than the public vote. This system came after the 2017 Yuri!!! on Ice sweep, when fan mobilisation dominated the results. The jury setup helps prevent popularity from completely taking over, but it also creates a weird tension: Crunchyroll can celebrate tens of millions of votes, while the final winners are mostly shaped by a panel.
For Malaysian and SEA anime fans, the awards are still worth watching. They influence what gets talked about, what gets merch pushes, what newer fans add to their watchlists, and what dominates Discord, TikTok, cosplay circles, and convention chatter. If your favourite anime wins, it can absolutely boost visibility.
But fans should also understand what this event is. It is part celebration, part marketing, part fandom poll, and part industry signal. That does not make it useless. It just means we should not treat it like the final word on anime quality.
The Crunchyroll Anime Awards has the audience, the timing, and the global anime wave behind it. Now it needs the one thing harder than hype: trust.
Source: Anime News Network