>>26667461You want the painful, banal truth?
People who scratch their heads genuinely baffled that many aren't watching their 'superior, more talented and hardworking' indies or nijis or whoever - you have to realize: it's a lot like playing on a private MMO server.
You can have better rates. You can have more active admins. You can have more content and unique items. But you aren't the real thing. You are small. Everything you do, everyone you meet, counts for 'less'. This is why people keep whining on official forums for say, WoW, instead of just migrating en masse to a free private server where those changes have been made for ages. Because those 'don't count' even though they offer the same content with more than enough people that the lower population size doesn't matter.
For many normalfags, they watch vtubers as merely an anchor point. Being able to talk in discord and twitter and reddit, being able to see fanarts, being able to go , "OMG CLIPPERS CLIP THIS" - being able to feel like they're part of a giant whole of like-minded people. How much entertaining the vtuber is doesn't matter - for most people they can't distinguish between them. They aren't critical. They already maxed out their entertainment cap regardless of which streamer they watch. So they simply watch the bigger one, because that means they have a better chance of talking to people who watch the same thing and consuming more safe, familiar fan content.
