Kodansha’s K Manga App Faces Severe Criticism For Its Gacha-Like Subscription System!

On May 10, Kodanha release their K Manga app exclusively for their US audience. The move was made to increase the accessibility of manga in the market.

However, it seems like the plan has backfired. This is because of Kodansha’s pricing policy, which people claim to be Gacha-like.

For those unaware, Gacha is a sub-genre of games, where players pay real money to get characters and items at random.

This system has often been criticized as being exploitative and making the game “pay to win”.

Furthermore, players can earn certain currencies to open characters at random for free as well, although it’s much harder and limited.

While users won’t get chapters at random through K Manga, the purchasing system is eerily similar.

For every 0.99$, users will get 148 points. For $4.99 for 515 points, and $7.99 for 921 points.

While this may doesn’t sound bad, wait until you hear the charge for each chapter.

On average, one chapter costs between 59 to 139 points. This means that users will have to pay one dollar for a chapter each.

If you don’t want to pay, you can watch a limited number of ads to earn enough for 1-5 chapters/day.

It costs $190.35 to buy all of Rent-A-Girlfriend digitally through Kmanga vs $152.74 on Amazon pic.twitter.com/Bx2Xb5eQ6T

— 🧭Manga Alerts & Restocks #uw7s🌊 (@MangaAlerts) May 10, 2023

Fans are extremely upset with Kodansha, especially due to the new VIZ app that charges $1.99/month for their whole library.

there's no manga I love enough to pay a dollar per chapter for pic.twitter.com/gXGNeKjPpu

— Oblivious (@oblivibum) May 10, 2023

This is far from the affordable prices that people were expecting. Furthermore, Kodansha even removed the listings for their series from platforms like Crunchyroll manga to make them exclusive to the K Manga App.

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