Alright, it took a bit longer than I wanted, but I evaluated the newest piece of Corporate speak that we got from Cover. They released a Powerpoint Presentation that detailed their company makeup, but it was all in Japanese, of course. But I ran it through some translation software, and have a reasonable understanding of what they were saying, so I'll tell you my key takeaways. I only really have two big ones, as outside of that, it's very standard "Corporate Pitch" stuff.
>First Note of Interest: The Purpose of Hololive's Video GameThe purpose is not to be a video game, at least in the way that you are used to or may expect with the equivalents, like Breath of the Wild. It's instead meant to be a persistent social space first and foremost. The intention of that Virtual Space is to provide enjoyable things that video games provide, of course, but that is only one part of their goal. The other things that they plan on doing with that Hololive video game are:
>Live Concerts>Fan meet and greets>Persistent hangout spot for fans of Hololive, possibly talents as well>Production and sale of assets ("buy a Hololive T-Shirt to wear to the concerts in the virtual space," think like that, cosmetic MTX of your oshi or of fan event merch)This is what a lot of old people are calling a "Metaverse" these days. If you were to ask me, I'd say this: Hololive is bringing back Second Life, in Holo form, but with a special plug-in that allows talents to stream motion-capture data directly into their server. Which, fine, I didn't ever dislike that kind of stuff, may as well go full Club Penguin with it.
>Second Note: The Boring Stuff for the General Public, Which is Interesting to MeSo, this is Cover's internals. This is the stuff that you guys never see, but they work with day-to-day. Staff makeup, benefits, values, etc. The takeaways here:
>Average age of COVER Employees: 30 years old>Technology Engineers make up a full 25% of all employees>Content Production, which includes talent mangers, Operations, 3D Animation, Music Production, 3D Studio and overall "Content Production Department," is 44% of all employees>Planning for Big Events and Cover's internal Managers account for 7% of the company>Marketing and sales people (people who get merch made and organize collabs with outside sales forces) are only 9%>The internal office workers are 15%That's decently interesting. It's worth knowing just how many people are around, and the amount of people who are working in each place.
They also have their values on display, and one EXTREMELY IMPORTANT thing caught my attention. In their set of personal values that they want their company to have, they said
>Thinking from the Perspective of StakeholdersThat's IMPORTANT. Not "Shareholders," aka, the investors and money men, but "Stakeholders," aka, everyone involved in the company's success. That includes Fans, Talents, the Country, any outside force that isn't just the investor. That may seem minor for you, but from the business world, I need to emphasize that there is a massive, MASSIVE difference between companies that focus on "Shareholder Value Maximization" and companies that focus on "Stakeholder Value Maximization." The ones that focus on Stakeholders are typically far, FAR better to work for than the Shareholder focused companies, so that's an extremely good mark for Cover.
A smaller, but decently relatable, set of things that I found were their Employee Benefits! So here's the list of Benefits that Cover gives to their employees, not all of them but the ones I think are neat:
>Flexible hours>Work-From-Home>Holiday leave up the ass>Mental-Healthcare>They will pay for your vaccines>Complimentary health check-ups>Free Water (I've heard stories of JP companies that do not offer this, so that's good)>Employee Discounts on Talent merch and tickets to eventsAll in all, that's not a bad set of perks.
That's everything that I could find that was interesting and worthwhile in these slides. If you want to check them out yourself, my source is this:
>https://speakerdeck.com/covercorp/cover-corp-introductionI hope that's interesting to someone else, and I hope that I finished typing this up before Sora's collab stream starts because I haven't looked at the clock since I started this.
