>>24693520I'm a Nijifag but I don't really care that much about how management does merch.
The accepted way of doing things in Nijisanji is the livers are given creative freedom when it comes to their content in exchange for management being given freedom in how they use their image to make money or handling the corporate side of things.
The upside is Nijis are given almost no numbers quotas or pressure from management to cater their content towards growing. If you're someone like Elira who doesn't want the spotlight you're free to avoid it and do whatever content you want, but management also won't go out of their way to promote you. If you're someone like Vox who loves attention and is happy to do all sorts of sponsored content and shill the company then they'll be more likely to push you hard. You don't even need huge numbers, Chigusa gets a lot of support even though her numbers are quite weak because she's happy to participate in tons of content.
This is the same for merch, management pretty much has sole discretion on producing merch. Early on they did custom voice packs where you could pay $100 to get the girls to read a script you write them. Lazulight and Obsydia complained about it taking too much of their time, so future waves, even Luxiem, never got a chance to do it as it was scrapped. They do take input when the livers are unhappy with the merch, but livers have almost no involvement in how it's produced, nor do they care unless it directly affects their workload like voicepacks.
Lazulight are probably miffed that Luxiem's merch announcement overshadowed their own merch due to the timing, but I doubt they care at all that management are pushing Luxiem. It gives them freedom to work on their own personal projects and no one has ever indicated that they're being ignored or neglected due to Luxiem. They each have their own managers, Luxiem's success doesn't interfere with Lazulight's ability to get game perms or release covers or whatever. The only thing that's difficult is producing their own personalized merch because it requires a large budget that they have to earn. So far no one in NijiEN has had personalized merch though.
