>>4978992That was before the west gave a damn about vtubers. The market cap has grown since then. And cover, the reigning champions, just shit the bed by spending the last year locking their en talent in the cuckshed and preventing Haachama from playing with her American friends. At this point, I think we all must be a bit tired of having to reset the calender back to 0 days without incident.
I'm not saying they'll be big in the east. Probably not. Nips love their inertia and old staples. They're also competing with the unfettered holos who haven't been dicked over by management as much. And nijisanji. And 774. And react. And so on and so forth. The jp market is what'll be incredibly hard but not impossible to crack.
But as for the west, we're much easier. What do we have? Managerially gimped hololive en? Nijisanji en who are conventional turbonormies by vtuber standards? The whores over at Vshoujo? Tsunderia and kawaii whose talents are so homogenous you can't tell them apart? Various struggling indies who lack the resources and infrastructure to put themselves on the map? The only one who stands out as a juggernaut is ironmouse, whose also gimped by her association with controversial simp farmers. All phase has to do is win over enough of the en fanbase who just want fun anime girls doing fun things without nonstop tabs and the inertia might propel them into a larger spotlight. And when the west takes notice, the westaboos in jp might get interested as well. And if the deer girl speaks Chinese, that makes it accessible to the third and last significant market (the governmentally contested China region) which propelled hololive to greatness in the first place through devoted fan efforts.
The only unknown is if phase's talents are strong enough entertainers to lift themselves up above irrelevance. They have to be if they want to succeed, as hololive set the standard that an agency is built primarily on the strength of its talents alone.
>>4979229They seem to be trying to be homogenous, brand safe and family friendly. Or in the case of Vshoujo, degenerate to a base breaking degree. The middle ground is completely unoccupied except by hololive, which is chained down by stodgy japanese management. The field is ripe for an upset.
>>4979389They're failures in the sense that they expand the ecosystem without contributing anything astoundingly new to it. Hololive started with powerful yet unique personalities who, according to aki, didn't even know how to leverage collabs or generational dynamics for more interesting content. This revitalized interest when they were discovered and led to the boom. It was only possible because the talents were so strikingly unique that the roster effectively carpet bombed enough niches to appease a wide range of viewers. Phase appears to have a similarly varied roster, and (their actual ability to entertain notwithstanding) they might just surpass niji en if western communities latch onto them. Nijiniggers will kill themselves, but I'm willing to make that sacrifice if it means having new waifus to watch and less retread of the same hololive threads for the umpteenth time.
