For a studio that thinks of itself, first and foremost, as a place that makes animation, the decision to also build a platform is not an obvious one. It demands engineering work that has nothing immediately to do with storytelling. It demands disciplines — operations, infrastructure, design systems for software rather than for film — that are alien to most production environments. It commits the studio to a long-term obligation that survives any particular project. It is, by most internal accounting, the harder choice.
We made it anyway, and the reasons are worth writing down while they are still fresh.
The first reason is the one we’ve already written about elsewhere: distribution and production are not really separable, and the studios that try to keep them apart pay for it in ways that are sometimes hard to see until the bill comes due. If we believe — and we do — that the way anime reaches its audience shapes the kind of anime that gets made, then we cannot in good faith outsource the way it reaches its audience to a third party with a different set of incentives. Building the platform ourselves is the price of that conviction. It is an expensive price. It is, we think, the right one.
The second reason is more specific. Anime, as a medium, has a difficult relationship with the platforms that have grown up around it. The dominant streaming services were not built for it; the lengths of the work they were built for are different, the cultural cadences they expect are different, the way they think about catalogue and discovery is different. Anime fits, when it fits, by accommodation. We wanted to build something that started from the medium rather than ending at it — that asked, from the first design decision, what would best serve the work we are also trying to make. That ambition does not survive being layered on top of an existing platform; it has to be there from the foundation.
The third reason is less idealistic, and more about the long term of running a studio. Studios that own the surface their work appears on are, structurally, more durable than studios that rent it. They are less exposed to the pricing decisions of intermediaries, less dependent on shifts in catalogue policy, less subject to the whims of recommendation algorithms tuned for other priorities. None of this matters in any single year. All of it matters across the decades that we hope this studio exists.
These are the reasons we did it. They are not the same as the reasons anyone else should. Building a platform is a real cost, and we recognise that there are studios for which the cost is not worth the return. We would not be doing it ourselves if we did not believe — and we do believe — that the work we want to make is shaped by the medium of its delivery in ways that justify the investment. Different studios, with different intentions, can reasonably arrive at different answers.
A note on what the platform is and is not. It is, for now, in private beta. It is being rolled out gradually because we would rather get the early shape of it right than scale it before we are sure of what we are scaling. It is built end to end by our small team, which is both a constraint and, we think, an asset — every decision is visible to everyone, every trade-off is made in the same room. It will, in time, open more broadly. We are not in a hurry.
A second note on what the platform is not. It is not the product of the studio. The product of the studio is anime — animation that we have made, distributed, or both. The platform is the means by which that product reaches its audience. The discipline of keeping that distinction clear, internally, is something we are conscious of every day. The platform is a workshop tool. The work is what we are here for.
Beyond that, we will say more as there is more to say. For now, a note from a studio in its earliest months, on the largest and strangest decision it has made so far.
We are not, in the end, building a platform because we wanted to build a platform. We are building it because we want to make anime, and the anime we want to make demands it. That is the honest version. We will let it stand.
— AnimePocky Studio