>>48597325Well, firstly, how high are indies' ceiling nowadays? That wasn't a sarcastic or rhetoric question, I'm serious. If we are to take a look at numberfags' table, there were only 10 EN Indies (9 actually, since one of them is Neuro) on Twitch reached 2k average on Twitch. There are even fewer on YT because of their dumb number culling and how the algorithm works. On the other hand, there are dozens thousands indies around outside of those 10-ish VTubers - 99.99% of them don't get anywhere near 1k mark. That's how many that can get a lot of profit from simply being part of Hololive.
Moreover, the limitations you brought up are true. After all, Sana supposedly graduated because she wanted to focus on, and streams Arknights after all. There are also Shondo (just bringing her up since I just saw her shitpost on the catalog) who flat out said that she doesn't want to join either Hololive, Niji or VShojo because it will affect her kind of contents. However, how many of those dozens thousands indies share that mindset? How many will prefer keeping their "brand" (most of them don't even have one to begin with) over way higher income, fame, and popularity? I don't think it's more than a few dozens, perhaps a hundred at most, desu. Even NijiEN who has similar conditions to HoloEN, but less benefits, had no issue whatsoever to find new members - do you think Cover will actually have any issue looking for 5 indies to turn into stars if they need to? If they won't, why should they change part of their conditions?
Ultimately, it's like how a lot of IT devs can live well being freelancers, but most of them would still join FAANG at the first chance if they can. Just because there are some (emphasis on "some", since it's not like it's that many) indies who can make a living of it on their own doesn't mean most indies wouldn't profit from, and love to join corpos (be it HololiveEN or NijisanjiEN)
