>>22349306Vtubers will not change much, it's the same as it is with every other media format. Light novels, manga, anime, VNs, for every good one there are 1,000 pieces of shit, for every popular one that is actually good, 10 pieces of shit that appeal to the lowest common denominator also get popular. The cream will slowly be separated from the crop, it's just a hodge podge as of now cause the medium is still relatively young. Streaming can not replace a well written story, which can not replace a beautifully animated movie, which can not replace a masterfully designed videogame.
What we're actually witnessing is the convergence of media production technology where individuals and small groups can put things out of equal or greater entertainment value than entire companies. The first major entertainment medium that was democratized in this fashion was music, someone extremely good at playing plastic buckets on the street can entertain people more than an established pop singer making overproduced corporate tracks where people can't feel any passion. The next big industry to hit that decentralization of production technology was art, digital art means people with a 2002 laptop can make art as good as people with $20,000 paints and brushes and easels. Then came video, which people think started in the late 80 / early 90s with the introduction of home video but it really started around 2008 with the release of the Canon EOS 5D Mk II and the Magic Lantern custom firmware hack. It was then accelerated by the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera in 2012 and has just gone crazy since then. Now people with $2,000 of equipment and a bit of drive can make videos that both sound and look better than some blockbuster movies that cost tens of millions and have staff lists in the hundreds. Between that time period we got Blender Cycles, which democratized high end rendering technology in a completely free program, which was such a major leap for 3D art at the time that it was basically a biblical revelation, and it continued to evolve. Fast forward a decade to Cycles X, RTX graphics cards in laptops, UE5 is free, there are enough free VST plugins to clean and design your own audio for free, tutorials for every subject, and you can write a full script on your phone with automatic formatting just by dictating into it if you want. The entire entertainment media landscape is getting democratized, and only the best or the most heavily marketed survive. 10 years ago people couldn't even begin to imagine rendering 10,000,000 polygons on a home computer and now you can do that real time in a game engine for free.
Outside the Vtuber sphere the rest of the entertainment industry continued to advance. Ryo Timo can make animations of a higher quality than entire studios in less time all on his own with free software. Ian Hubert has more finely tuned a low poly photobash approach to 3D rendering and CGI that results in sequences most people have a hard time distinguishing from the work of ILM. Teenagers are making hit songs with $100 of software and $20 of instruments from garage sales. Some of the most popular writing on the planet is on fucking wattpad and amazon self published. Binging with Babish has more viewers and just as much production value as most of Food Network. We are in midst of a massive paradigm shift in who makes the media we consume and how easy it is for us to find it. What was once considered sheer lunacy for entire companies only 15 years ago is now possible with a decent enough laptop.
Now think about all those advancements and evolutions in modern media production, and realize than 90% of japanese companies involved with such production are still living in 2005. That's why there's a disparity in entertainment value, especially when Vtubers are rapidly moving into territory closer to stuff like the Jerma Dollhouse with semi scripted live theatre becoming more and more popular. Virtual production and free technology means all this stuff will only get better for individual creators, meanwhile the japanese executives greenlighting production of isekai garbage #582 with a budget of $200 per episode still need to send their business decisions by fax.
