>>19087014You could avoid killing the hype by not publicly revealing the winner until the actual reveal, instead maybe just announcing the top 10 in a preceding stream at the end of the contest with a note to tune into the final reveal to see which one won, and if you set the contract deals beforehand when you announce the contest, you don't have to worry about negotiating and can set the prize to be similar to what you would pay for a commission of the design sheet. You could even avoid people going crazy and trying to renegotiate if you only announce the top 10 so if the first choice goes menhera, you can just go with your second choice and claim it was the winner without anyone being the wiser. I also would be surprised if mamas/papas are collecting royalties since they're doing the work under contract and Cover owns the resulting characters and art, though there is certainly an implicit agreement that they'll get follow up contracts for merch art. Probably will never happen because that's not how Cover operates, but I could see it being entirely doable.
