Sony Is Giving Crunchyroll Its Own Anime Hub on the PS5 Home Screen, but Not Until Spring 2027

By CriticalPixel · 2026-10-08

Sony has finally decided that the PS5 home screen has room for anime. At the inaugural Crunchyroll Anime Future Forum on October 7, Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Hideaki Nishino announced that Crunchyroll is getting its own dedicated hub on the PlayStation 5, arriving in Spring 2027. The pitch is a single place that brings together anime, anime-inspired games and easy access to the Crunchyroll app. IGN reported the announcement, and Noisy Pixel lays out the same details. It looks like a small menu change on paper, but it says plenty about how Sony wants its console to look a year from now.

Official Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut screenshot from the Steam store page

What Sony and Crunchyroll actually announced

Here is the short version of what is confirmed. The hub will live on the PS5 home screen and promises to bring together anime, anime-inspired games and easy access to Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll says players will get a dedicated place to discover anime and anime-inspired games and open the full Crunchyroll app. Spring 2027 is the only timing on offer, and neither report I read gives a month, a region list or any word on whether browsing the hub needs a subscription. Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini framed it as a step beyond what already exists, pointing to Crunchyroll membership on PlayStation and the upcoming Ghost of Tsushima: Legends anime series. His line was "Serving fans means meeting them where they already are." Neither report includes a mockup of the hub itself, so the design is anything but settled.

The numbers behind the move

The scale is what makes this more than a menu tweak. IGN notes the PS5 has a worldwide installed base of over 92 million units as of earlier this year, which is a huge audience to point at one streaming service. Sony also owns the other side of the deal, because Funimation bought Crunchyroll for nearly $1.2 billion in 2021. That makes this Sony promoting its own purchase on its own hardware. Seen that way, the hub is less a partnership favor and more a shelf placement in the most valuable store Sony controls. The timing also lines up with the Ghost of Tsushima: Legends anime series, which Purini name-checked in the same breath, a show built on a PlayStation game that Sony would love to cross-sell in both directions.

Second official Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut screenshot from the Steam store page

What anime-inspired games will mean in practice

The phrase doing the heavy lifting is anime-inspired games. That is a fuzzy label, and nobody has said who decides what qualifies. A hub like this only works if a human with taste curates it instead of an algorithm that dumps every cel-shaded title in the store onto one page. If it ends up as another banner that pushes whatever Sony is selling this quarter, people will scroll past it within a week. If it surfaces actual discoveries, like a cult JRPG sitting next to the anime that inspired it, it could be the first PlayStation menu addition in years worth opening on purpose. Adding a hub also means something else on the home screen has to give, and Sony has not said what.

How people reacted

Reaction in the replies under IGN's post on X was small and split, so treat it as a sample and not a verdict. One reply called it a huge win for the Crunchyroll community. Another pointed out that it took Sony almost six years after buying Crunchyroll to put it on the home screen. A third complained that with no free tier Crunchyroll sucks now, and said corporate owners drain the life out of everything. A fourth wondered aloud whether people really have that kind of money coming in. Four replies is not a consensus, and the post itself had only a few dozen likes when I read it, so the honest summary is that reaction is limited and mixed.

The CriticalPixel take

My read is that this is a good idea announced at the slowest possible speed. Spring 2027 is months away, there are no visuals, and the news came on stage at a Crunchyroll event with no further detail in the reports I read. The part I like is the games angle, because anime and games share a huge audience and a console menu is the obvious place to connect them. The part I distrust is the incentive. Sony owns Crunchyroll, so expect the hub to push Crunchyroll first and everything else second, the same way every platform owner treats a shelf it controls. If Sony wants this to land, it should say what goes on the hub, who curates it and whether the Crunchyroll app finally gets proper integration with the console instead of a prettier icon.

Third official Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut screenshot from the Steam store page

For now the takeaway is small but solid: anime gets a front row seat on PlayStation in Spring 2027, backed by the company that owns the biggest anime streaming brand. Whether that front row is worth sitting in depends on details Sony and Crunchyroll have not shared yet. We will keep an eye out for screenshots and a firm date.