>>61530800the main draw of big companies is you have a "box" of people to interact with and for people to associate with you. someone like Aster who has zero appeal on his own can benefit from being in every iluna fanart or merch drop. sometimes he even benefits from raids or random viewers from other livers showing up to watch him during dead hours. if you're a vtuber with no confidence in yourself then having a company that will provide that box for you is appealing.
conversely leaving the box can be stressful for your fans. for example Nina's new incarnation only talks about vshojo talents now, and for her old fans who don't like vshojo this makes it really hard to watch. sacrificing your old fanbase for a new one can be scary, so vtubers will be less willing to ditch their abusive company for the sake of the fans.
in the western scene though indie vtubers are typically more popular than corpos. people don't care as much about the box and will just follow whoever they like. a lot of the largest twitch vtubers are corpos but right below them are a ton of indies who regularly get anywhere from 500 to 5k viewers. in terms of sheer volume the indies probably control more of the market than corpos.
