>>46045905Aside from the lockdown buff, HoloENs explosive growth and early dominace also came from a confluence of other factors (many of which have since weakened)
Novelty factor: A large part of the initial debut viewerbase was never actually committed fans in the first place, but basically just lockdown tourists. Vtubers were at the time the fresh new thing to entertain them while they were bored stuck at home. Now both the lockdowns are gone and vtubers aren't fresh and new anymore, so these people have moved on.
Only game in town factor: For Myth specifically, when they came out they were basically the "only game in town" and audiences had no real alternatives. We don't count Niji's embarrassing first attempt at "EN" (India), and twitch indies were still a minor league wild west wasteland. Holomyth came at a perfect lightning in a bottle moment, being the first serious attempt at a proper EN branch and Hololive was already the most popular corpo for westerners at the time due to the run-up of viral JP sub clips (Foobs scatman, Matsuri bandaids, Migo GTA, etc.) and a steady supply of english subs for their talents (shoutout to the chink idiots at Hololive Moments, by making Hololive popular in the west you made it easier for Cover to drop China during the Cocopocalypse, lol). The western audience was primed, hungry and ready for them. Now the EOP Hololive fans had "their own" vtubers in the Hololive ecosystem, and they can actually understand them without subs, omg!
How they've squandered their growth is another whole discussion, which inevitably invites too much antiposting and tribalism to have it calmly and rational. It's not like they're dying or anything, and by most reasonable metrics they're still the market leader in EN vtubing as a collective, but there's an undeniable plateau at least. Which is not surprising if you realise that the explosive early growth was never gonna continue lasting forever as things settled down into normaly. Novelty factor is gone, only game in town factor is gone, market is getting saturated with alternatives, there are many more other vtubers now and you're not stuck with the limited HoloEN selection anymore, which Cover probably waited a little too long to expand. And the increasing breaks and downtime of the remaining talents did their part to further depress their original momentum.
