[relentlessflame]

It's pretty clear that they're trying to position Crunchyroll as the sort of "Amazon Prime" of the anime world, with benefits across multiple channels in a single subscription. Their premium offering is already sort of positioned that way now if you look on the website, and with Right Stuf benefits eventually to be included (as strongly implied by their FAQs), it'll cement it even more.

At first Aniplex tried to make their own Aniplex+ store, but Right Stuf eventually took over all fulfillment for that. So I guess when Sony bought out Crunchyroll, it was weird because CR had their own Store while Aniplex (SMEJ) was partnered with Right Stuf. Rather than terminate the deal with Right Stuf and move to Crunchyroll, I guess they figured better to just buy Right Stuf's existing expertise in this space and eventually have them take over the retail side. (They say that, the two will run separately for the moment, but the emphasis there is clearly on "for the moment." Otherwise the acquisition really wouldn't make much sense.)

The erotica thing is actually kind of weird in a way. My guess is that it portends that, eventually, Right Stuf is going to become the "Crunchyroll Store" (or perhaps "Right Stuf: The Crunchyroll Store" or some such if they want to keep the Right Stuf brand) and they don't want adult content associated with the Crunchyroll name -- quite possibly because of fears of an effect on credit card processing complications (as we saw from the recent Pornhub news). Maybe they don't want it associated at all with Sony (although it'd surprise me if there truly wasn't any connection at some level, but perhaps abstracted away enough that there's plausible deniability). They're kind of cagey about who is running the new ero store, saying only that it's people from Las Vegas who have been "working closely with Right Stuf" for a long while. Maybe a distributor, or maybe some former RS staff? (Some people think it's actually going to be Right Stuf in the background just with a different warehouse for plausible deniability, but I guess we'll see if that connection ends up becoming apparent somehow.) Based on the domain names, it does look like this has probably only been in the works for a few weeks.

Anyway... I guess we'll see what it means for us, but the reaction has been fairly negative. People certainly don't like how it seems like everything is being consolidated under one mega company that controls the market. That said... considering how the production committee system works in Japan, it's pretty much been the case that almost all the anime production side was controlled by a very small "cartel" of Japanese companies too, so it may not be that surprising. I suspect they're also looking at the interest of Netflix and Disney in this space as being what to worry about, rather than the field of tiny anime-only players the market had before.