Ugh, I loathe to reply to a thread that's pretty much already descended to hell, but there IS an interesting discussion to be had about how VTubing went from scripted content to livestreams; part of it is simply that YouTube itself has changed, I think - other people have pointed out the loss of community subtitles and how that means that nowadays if you want attention outside of Japan you HAVE to have a dedicated clipper base. Another is economic, as others in this thread have pointed out - live2D has low startup costs compared to the fancy 3D studio setup; as cynical as it is to say it VTubing was only going to explode in popularity (as in the number of people doing it, not the size of the fanbase overall, though one tends to follow the other) once the startup and content creation costs got down low enough that you no longer needed a company backing you to create content.
And that's removing the changes in content on YouTube; for example, nowadays you no longer really see first playthroughs of games that aren't livestreamed anymore even outside of VTubing. Non-stream gaming content on YouTube today is basically almost exclusively A: livestream highlights (i.e. clips) B: documenting ridiculously skilled achievements (which is a form of content that requires being incredibly good at a game to make, and most VTubers aren't) and C: breakdowns on how games work, which is the kind of content in which the 'face' of the content creator doesn't matter. Any popular Let's Play-er on YouTube today is likely just riding inertia from the era in which that was the 'content meta' (for lack of better term).
To go even further, part of why VTubing will have a lot of issues going back to older scripted content is because fundamentally they'll need to answer a question that's pretty hard to answer, all things considered: what advantage does being 'virtual' give you in that space? You need to find content niches for which A: having a face is part of the content (so Video Essays and whatnot are out) and B: don't rely on IRL to provide some of the content (even as a background setting), which can be a limiting factor if you're trying to involve multiple people (and nowadays a LOT of popular YouTube-scripted-content is collab-based; to no one's surprise popular content creators like collaborating with other popular content creators); the only large-scale mega-collabs that work for the virtual sphere tend to be either video games, or maybe large group concerts, which - oh, hi hololive, I guess you're busy running the biggest VTuber event of the entire year by actively targeting a niche for which you can push the virtual advantage.
I could go on further (most notably in pointing out that within the EN sphere skit-comedy from non-virtual comedians is 95% just about lampooning current events, and being animated does not give you any sort of advantage in that arena), but at this point I'm already an idiot who has decided that wasting effort on trying to be nuanced on /vt/ is going to have any effect whatsoever, so I think I've said enough for the purposes of this thread.
