The State of The VTuber World - January 15, 2024
Top of The Line
I heard that Goldman Sachs put out a report on ANYCOLOR and Cover and finally I was able to find a credible source to link, which is from Yahoo Finance, so the above is true.
They are buying ANYCOLOR, they’re goal is 4700 Yen, while they are staying on Cover, some think because Cover is already on a plateau of sorts, but I’m not sure.
Also why is NijiEN’s communication team so bad? They have been bad since the beginning and they have not changed this since. It’s going to be three years now. Do they think EN communication is not necessary? Is there no one willing to take up on the offer?
I do wonder if there is actually a communication problem in general for Nijisanji, as if they just didn’t factor in hiring a communication department and never are going to. It’s an odd department to cut off, how expensive is communication in relation to tech for example, but Riku has a distaste for communication in general? I haven’t a clue on this one.
Specialite debuted their remaining members, and it’s interesting there that JP members are running ahead, because it usually is the opposite, but it does bode a sign that the foreign boom is done and we’re back to JP-oriented growth, which is good for Nijisanji but not the EN branch, and somewhat okay for Hololive, it’s hard to say at this point, actually.
Or, it could be specific to the agency. That Nazi Loli is doing good numbers, becoming a breakout star here. (Writing that just means I’m never getting a normal job ever)
Rare Hololive News
As you know, I rarely write about Hololive these days. I was going to do something about the Mario Kart tournament, but there were too much changes, so I just threw all the data, but I’m glad that Towa won finally, I would have rooted for her, so I think my decision was well warranted, and hopefully next year will have more zakos in contention.
I am writing this however because Marine hit 3 million subscribers, which means we’re going to get that RPG maker game she created during high school, which I’m excited for. But I think it’s also interesting, because it gives the possibility that Marine might pass Gura.
Given the data and trends, and depends on if Marine continues on her path, which I think is likely given her career, I believe Marine will overtake Gura in about two years. And I think Gura is waiting for Marine to take over, so that she is deprived of the King of VTuber title, and so I’m thinking Gura won’t stream regularly until 2026, so ‘sorry Chumbuds’ is my conclusion.
Oh, and there was this recent change to 3D lives, which was something that I was hinting at for the last few months. Something must give, and this policy was definitely that something.
Again, Hololive’s biggest challenge and priority is about balance and this should make the balance go the other way. By limiting the 3D lives, not only it gives the members more of a chance to stream, but it also gives way to more new members without crowding. Again, if there is one 3D live per Hololive member, then there should be one live per week, which is a good frequency, and that is discounting all the official and sponsored streams, which means we will likely still have two per week, or thereabouts, considering the increase in the official department.
Now back to your regularly scheduled Nijisanji and other content.
The Golden 20
This is a really fascinating topic, because NijiEN is very peculiar in their history. It’s unlike Hololive in all their branches or any other branches in Nijisanji or any medium size company at all. NijiEN is unique in their fandom and it’s completely antithetical to how Nijisanji operates.
This is something that I was warning everyone when that initial rise happened with Luxiem, because the fandom they brought was from a darker pool than something like Hololive.
To explain why, I’m going to talk about a remark from Yagoo from a recent interview.
HoloKR has been kind of a golden dream for at least three years. People have always speculated that it will happen soon and there should be preparation from the fandom, either for welcoming or for protection, and I have been wary about introducing HoloKR.
Yagoo was asked about the above, and his response was the same as mine. The KR environment is so different from the JP environment that it’s not bother touching.
And one of those reasons, something that I didn’t mention, is that KR fans are territorial. And that’s because K-pop groups don’t grow like J-pop groups.
There is a prank from AKB48 where they just plopped a normal person into the practice stage and no one knew the wiser. But what’s the message here? The message is that you can be a nobody and yet still get accepted as part of this grand tradition because that’s how it has always worked out. This is kind of necessary in this constant recruit model.
Meanwhile, knowing every member is an essential measure in the K-pop fandom, because it's a mark of a territory. It’s like knowing every member of your family. If you don’t know this person, then you are not part of this covenant and you are now the enemy.
Luxiem and Noctyx fans come from that side of the fandom, and that was unprecedented. That has never happened before and never will happen again, and for a good reason, which is that it’s once more completely antithetical to the approach of Nijisanji as a whole.
Look at JP. New members should bring new fans. There are Voltaction fans, there are Idios fans, there are fans of the Heroes, and there are fans of Ruri. (Sorry, Toto and Milan.) And they kind of form this gradient that goes from the fans of the 1st Gen six years ago, and it’s this gradient that makes for a long lasting fandom. That’s true for J-pop, long running anime series, and so on and so forth in the JP world. But that’s not how KR fandom works.
K-pop is war-like, as people would say, because of this territorial nature. You are a fan of this specific group and you are competing against every other group, and you need to either sign up for one group or another. This kind of mindset doesn’t match the JP setting.
Because this is what happened. Through the valiant effort of Nina and others, Luxiem and Noctyx fans were able to bring the first three waves as part of their mafioso. But when Iluna arrived, they realized it was too much, and pretty much rejected them. Which means the Golden 20 fans kind of sees the new gens as an enemy of the 20, like a body rejecting a new part.
As I worried back two years ago, ANYCOLOR basically flailed their arms trying to corral these fans while trying to replicate the Nijisanji method, because… they are Nijisanji. The incredibly rushed AR Live was a desperate measure to capitulate on the 20 before Mysta and Nina left. If the EN fandom wasn’t like the above, AR Live would have simply been in the Fall without Mysta and Nina, because that’s how the schedule would have gone.
So, as I do per the haters, this kind of purge might necessarily be needed. They simply have to drop all the territorial fans and hope the new members will bring fans that are more conducive to the JP method of growing an audience. Yes, that would lead to decimation of the revenue, but it would also be a more healthy and productive group of fans.
We’ll see if that is successful, because K-pop fans are called an army for a reason. They could probably destroy Russia/China if they really tried. And it’s probably the case that they would try to destroy Nijisanji and maybe even the entire VTuber fandom or Japan itself.
Final Stake in the Coffin
January of 2024 seems to be a turning point with both 1st Gen members leaving although I think everyone, including the person itself, was surprised on the Hololive side.
Mel will be fine though. She has been active in her other life. I’m sure she would still collaborate with Coco for example. It seems that this was a slip-up more than anything.
This is why I don’t like the secretive nature of this industry. One slip-up and one has to say goodbye, instead of… whatever, right? I don’t know, just the whole thing feels cold.
It’s so sudden that I don’t really have words at this moment. It’s also interesting they called it a termination even though it was mutual. People are mentioning Yugo, I actually was thinking about him before I heard the news, but the big difference is that Yugo was deemed a graduation, while this is called a termination. I don’t know, it just feels weird.
It feels wrong about what I’m writing because it’s personal, but I feel this incident is kind of a good place to talk about why I wrote so and so regarding Hololive in late half of 2023.
In my guess, about half of you think I’m some Hololive anti, and that’s because I wrote a post basically saying ‘I want Hololive to suffer’. And I always want to expound on the odd angle that post was going for, because there was a real mental break partially, so the point didn’t really come across and I had to address other things about that post and so on.
So, to recap, during the Hololive Summer 2023 concert, Cover decided to stream the concert not at their typical place but this new place, and as one could expect, the site died.
The next day, basically Cover showed the first day for free, and that ‘solved’ the problem, at least for the customers. But that was troublesome to me, because it was a show and the problem still remained. Like, why go for an untested new website for streaming, when the old site was fine, and in the end, they went back to the old site. What was that for?
Like, Cover ultimately made a business mistake here. But the response adds to the mythology that Cover is infallible, or at least that is how it seemed to me. Like, making the concert free seems to solve the problem, but it doesn’t address the problem at hand.
I feel like I haven’t made the case correctly, but what I’m trying to say, and what I have been saying is that Hololive is a very brittle company, and they are very good at hiding the problem, especially after what they went through in 2020.
Going back to Nijisanji, Yugo was mentioned above, but Yugo’s graduation had that 2 week suspension build up, and I think an incident that my mind brings up was regarding what happened with Gibara and accidental breaching there - there wasn’t this sudden drop of a hammer but simply kind of neglect, and then Gibara left by running out the contract. Like Gibara had a goodbye, a last minute outfit reveal and everything, and given the statements, what Gibara ‘did’ was actually a bit worse than what Mel supposedly did…
In Nijisanji, almost always you feel something bad is going to happen, but you don’t with Hololive, and personally that’s a much worse bargain. Right, bad news in Hololive drops like a rock and you are just swept away without really thinking and that’s not very good.
Bonus - VShojo Infiltration Theory
I used to have a Tin Foil section, where I would expound on a theory that is very unlikely to be true, and I think it’s better as a bonus section than making it public. And this one is The Big One. Like, this is very detailed and involved and very much deranged… So let's start.
VShojo was an agency that started, I believe, in February of 2021, after a successful wave of English VTubers led to an early community being formed around Nyanners and Ironmouse. When they were first announced, I was intrigued but worried, because it seemed the management was more ambitious than they should have been. If they stayed in their lane and made VShojo as a kind of OfflineTV for VTubers, then they would have been fine.
But the management had much more ambition regarding VShojo, and they immediately kind of set on a course as an ‘free’ alternative to big corporations at the time, Hololive and Nijisanji. They frequently touted this ‘creative freedom’ to any media that would report on their success and they were somewhat openly antagonistic to Hololive and Nijisanji, and they slowly decided to break up the big companies through subtle outside campaigns.
Opportunity struck in July of 2021 when Kiryu Coco famously left Hololive, her graduation stream was the most watched VTuber stream in terms of max CCV until the 2023 Hololive Year-End concert, at least to my knowledge. Considering Coco’s story and her stated reasons for leaving Hololive, it seemed like Coco was speaking VShojo’s language.
But Coco, now KSon, was not really into destroying Hololive, she rightly thought that she would be trapped in Hololive if she didn’t leave now. Note that Coco is really the only person in Hololive to have a genuine graduation, all the others kind of left without a trace. So, the initial efforts to recruit KSon failed, until the next big thing happened in Hololive.
We can talk about the Rushia incident all day, but when that happened in February of 2022, suddenly the tune changed for KSon. KSon knew Rushia, now Mikeneko, was in trouble mostly in her mental state, and she wanted some backing and the offer was getting more generous.
So famously, KSon jumped into VShojo along with Nazuna, which was Mikeneko’s persona within VShojo. This was… a temporary measure, Nazuna never really understood the Twitch culture and eventually she would find her own place with Voice-Ore… but they had KSon and Rushia, but still they weren’t gung ho about destroying Hololive.
Then Luxiem happened in December of 2021 and they had another competitor. At first, they were friendly, Ironmouse especially had a close connection with them, and they did the trick, because Mysta had some bad financial decisions and asked Ironmouse for help. Ironmouse introduced a company accountant to deal with Mysta’s personal problems, and if one was a sound person this should have rung alarm bells, but Mysta was soon incorporated.
They had their own problems, in the Spring of 2023, three members left. Note how Veibae and Silvervale were one of the most outspoken on the ‘creator freedom’ strategy of VShojo when they were part of their team, but since they have left, they haven’t said anything of the like. But their Nijisanji recruitment strategy was fully on the way. Nijisanji already had troubles regarding their foreign division since the very start, but VShojo wasn’t going to let that turn into waste. They snatched Nina as well, using her desperate need for friends against her…and likely, possibly, Mika and Pomu as well, at least that’s what VShojo has been planting.
But they were still outflanked by Hololive, and if it were the news of the week, I would have just ended the theory here, that while their attack on Hololive failed, their attack on Nijisanji seems to be successful, and who knows where they would go, but… let me entertain this further.
Mel, or should I say Rikka, has been in the business for five and a half years, and as Rikka, for over a decade, and I would say that one would develop a good intuition for whom to trust in the decade-plus years of business. I certainly won’t divulge something that could break NDA with your typical family or friends, that seems like common sense that even Mel can understand.
But I think there is one person Rikka could trust enough that they could say things that would break an NDA and that person could betray Mel and lead Mel to be unceremoniously kicked out of the company - note that Mel had a collab project that would span the entire year, Mel was very ambitious coming onto 2024, so this is a big loss for her. And it’s someone we know.
It’s KSon.
Again, this is a wild theory, but I think that’s the only person that fits into what Rikka said about trusting someone that shouldn’t have been trusted. Considering how KSon seemingly covered her word regarding the parting of Nazuna, when she didn’t need to… it’s odd.
Again, this is the Tin Foil section, this is where wild theory goes rampant, so in my sound judgment, I would say, do not believe in any of this, but I would point to signs if this theory has some water stored in it, and it depends on how open Mel was with Cover.
Choco leaves Hololive under suspiciously similar conditions. I think Kanata knows KSon has been compromised and has been distant with Kson for a while now. Choco has been close and if Mel didn’t tell Cover or Choco, I think she could fall into the same trap. Again, unlikely.
There would be a severe decrease in collabs with VShojo from Hololive, not that there were plenty of collabs between them. Again, that seems unlikely, and likely there would be several collab with VShojo that would disprove my point, but I’m just putting this here.
This theory has been nagging my brain for, like, six months, and I wanted to have a place to write the whole thing down clearly, although I think I didn’t do that last part very well. Now that I wrote it, it will get unspooled, and I wouldn’t have to think about this, but it’s out there now.