>>56868424Yeah, I think you're relatively close to the truth.
The problem with Holostars is that Yagoo (presumably) has been pushing the unit too hard when it clearly hasn't been working out, and they don't have the right business strategy for the unit either. Holostars as a whole needs a rethink and new strategy, or else it needs to be wound down.
The primary strategy so far has been to keep making them collab with Hololive. Then, the idea goes, the Hololive fans will learn to love the male streamers and not only that, people who like the dynamics in Niji will also start coming over to Hololive to watch too.
They have done this over and over for years, and it keeps driving down Hololive's numbers while doing nothing at all to help Holostars. Hololive's core fanbase are basically people who want to watch their anime waifus play video games and act cute, they don't want to see them flirting and chumming around with male streamers. I am sure most of the viewers understand, even if they don't admit it, that their waifu may have a boyfriend or husband, but they don't want that shoved into their face on screen and popping their fantasy bubble. A lot of Myth and Council have been basically ruined by collabs with males followed by brain-dead responses. The current collab Hololive is doing with Holostars with Overwatch 2 is case in point - Lui has already had to post an extensive apology/explanation for it.
I suspect Cover (and its talents) also have dreams of getting rid of these people that no one likes for a "mainstream" audience. But like most corpos, they never bother to define what this "mainstream" is and how to actually reach them. The existence of "the mainstream" is always fuzzy, ill-defined, and mostly marketing speak that translates to "people who think just like the CEO and the management team."
Holostars would be perfectly fine, if not very profitable, if they weren't trying to leech Hololive. Instead, the unit is actually harmful as it stands and causing Hololive talents to lose views, superchats, and memberships. Cover and its talents need to understand who their audience is, and then carefully study what successful male vTubers do, instead of hoping that the next forced Holostars collab with Fubuki or Suisei will magically fix their fundamental problems. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
