>>24454287Kizuna Ai had huge novelty buff. It was one of those things that no one does, you do it, someone notices it and your career just snowballs from there. I don't think term "vtuber" even existed then, she was just a nice looking anime youtuber making cute videos who had no (serious) competition for a long time. It didn't exactly end well but that's life
I'm not sure about Luna because I didn't follow her but a lot of people consider her album one of the best in vtuber sphere. She also debuted early (2017 Dec) while the market was not as competitive.
Nijisanji was probably the first company to bring many new talents under their roof as vtubers so people looking for entertaining streamers with anime avatars had a lot to look forward to. Of course, the CEO is a literal walking bag of money so he could afford to try and fail various projects related to nijisanji. A lot of indie startups don't have that luxury.
When it comes to Hololive the thing that set them apart was their whole idol concept. Since idols groups such as AKB48 are(were) huge it attracted a lot of attention. Also, because members like Haachama and Coco would sometimes speak English, it made foreign fans more interested which resulted in English clips being shared on the internet which then attracted a lot of foreign viewers who boosted their CCV in turn creating more interest in Japan itself.
What did Sony do? Nothing. They didn't have the novelty buff and didn't try to twist vtubing concept in any creative way. They could have saved it all and became one of the biggest vtuber companies if they simply invested more money and time since they have all the resources and connections to dwarf hololive and nijisanji but they either gave up or fucked up.
