Kotaku’s Cecilia D’Anastasio reported Amazon’s ending their Anime Strike service. I bet you’re wondering, aside from the double paywall, with the amount of titles they have on their service why shutter the service? Why not try and stick with it?

Well, here’s why they cancelled it — and it’s all tweet based!

https://twitter.com/alexcosborn/status/946554487879090177

https://twitter.com/nickisnixed/status/945513258257145856

https://twitter.com/EpicNinjaMike/status/945414349534957568

https://twitter.com/andrearitsu/status/934414144295620608

Usually, you can find a few reasons why a service manages to fail. For Anime Strike, it has no one to blame but itself. Forget just their service itself — they barely established themselves in the anime industry. The idea is maybe they wanted to dictate the market, but not with their corporate, cold interactions, from their social media to their interactions to people in the industry. And most certainly their desire to never actually tell people they have this service (still surprised it was never mentioned in any of their Prime emails).

Over the course of a year the only thing they did was alienate a segment of people, from fans to media to industry people. Maybe (probably) got people to pirate anime. There might have been a plan from whoever came up with this idea, but it wasn’t executed well at all. Either way, to only go out in a year is terrible. Most ideas last two or three years, so the fact that it’s been gutted now is horrible for them.

When you think about the legacy of Anime Strike, a seminal moment will come when, maybe this year or next, you get into a discussion about what service is offering what. When Anime Strike gets mentioned, someone will ask what is Anime Strike. It’s a service that doesn’t exist anymore, but it did. “Huh. I’m usually aware of most services, but I’ve never heard of it until now.”

Maybe a better service will adopt what they were doing (or just them moving titles to Prime helps), and actually make it worth everyone’s time.