PS5 Is Getting a Crunchyroll Anime Hub in Spring 2027

Your PlayStation 5 home screen is about to get a lot more anime. Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Hideaki Nishino took the stage at the inaugural Crunchyroll Anime Future Forum in New York in October 2026 to announce a dedicated Crunchyroll anime hub coming to the PS5 home experience in spring 2027, as reported by Gematsu. The hub pulls anime, anime-inspired games and the Crunchyroll app into one permanent menu space, putting a streaming service front and center on a game console for the first time.

So what does the Crunchyroll anime hub actually do? It lives inside the PS5 home screen rather than as a separate download, and it is designed to make anime discovery part of the everyday console experience. Instead of opening a streaming app in isolation, players browse shows and anime-flavored games from the same menu where they launch everything else, with the hub surfacing anime content alongside the characters and worlds they already know from gaming.

Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini positioned the move as the next step in a partnership that already spans Crunchyroll membership on PlayStation and an upcoming Ghost of Tsushima anime series. "Serving fans means meeting them where they already are," Purini said in a press release, according to Final Weapon. That line is the whole pitch: stop making anime fans leave the console to find anime.

Why Sony is betting the home screen on anime

The business case is straightforward. Crunchyroll closed out March 2026 with more than 21 million paying subscribers around the world, making it one of the biggest anime platforms on the planet. Sony bought the service in 2021 for about one point one billion dollars, and its music arm also owns the anime studio Aniplex, which means the company now has a hand in anime production, streaming and the screen you watch it on. The Crunchyroll anime hub is how Sony ties all three together.

The creative logic lands just as cleanly for players who live at the intersection of both fandoms. Anime and gaming draw from deeply engaged and overlapping communities, and a dedicated menu space finally treats them as a single audience. A player who falls for a character in a game can find the related series a tile away, while a series fan might stumble on an anime-inspired game they never would have opened otherwise. The Crunchyroll anime hub turns that crossover from a happy accident into a built-in feature.

That crossover is already showing up in PlayStation's own projects. The Ghost of Tsushima: Legends adaptation arrives next year as a game-to-anime project from Sony's own backyard, the kind of title that will presumably get prime placement once the hub goes live. It is the clearest sign yet that Sony sees its game catalog as an anime pipeline, not just a library.

The timing says a lot about the console wars

Look sideways at Nintendo and the strategy looks even sharper. Crunchyroll's app on the original Nintendo Switch is discontinued on October 30, 2026, and the company has nothing announced for the Switch 2, which does not currently support several video-on-demand services, according to Final Weapon. While Nintendo's platforms are losing Crunchyroll entirely, Sony is giving the streamer its own room inside the PS5. The Crunchyroll anime hub becomes a genuine differentiator: one console treats anime as a headline feature, the other treats it as an afterthought.

It is also part of a much bigger Crunchyroll push announced at the same October 2026 forum. Crunchyroll Manga expanded into English-speaking markets including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and India, and Sony Pictures announced a new Storyworks division focused on anime and live-action adaptations. The Crunchyroll anime hub is the PlayStation-facing piece of a company-wide bet that anime is still under-served on screens outside the phone.

What we still do not know

Plenty, honestly. Sony has not released mockups of the Crunchyroll anime hub, so nobody knows what the design looks like or how content gets curated. There is no word yet on whether browsing the hub requires a Crunchyroll membership, which regions get it first, or how tightly it ties into the PlayStation Store. If you can grab a season of anime as easily as buying a game, that changes the equation entirely. The 2027 launch window is the only date on the table, so expect details to trickle out through the winter.

Still, the direction is unmistakable. A decade ago, anime on consoles meant a clunky app buried in a store tab. In 2027, it gets its own front door on one of the best-selling consoles of this generation. For a generation that grew up watching anime between matches, the Crunchyroll anime hub is less a new feature than a long-overdue acknowledgment: the fandom was already here, and now the home screen knows it.

For more on where anime meets PlayStation, see our anime and animation coverage, including why Magic Knight Rayearth is returning to TV after three decades.