Tl;dr scummy practice and mismanagement on upd8
- In 2019, they tried to replace Kizuna Ai with 2 different voice actors, and released a
song of all time with the lyrics of "Even if it's not me, it's fine". This triggered backlash within the community, losing her fans and viewership. In response to criticism, they added a 3rd
chinese only voice actor.
- Despite their top earners literally brings in $
millions (
archive) in revenue, it was reported that they ended 2019 in a net loss of
$6.2M.
- Around march 2020, their 2nd best performer Oda Nobuhime announced graduation on 30 April 2020. In a collab stream a week later with Tamaki, her best friend, she
stated (
Archive) that upd8 management took full control of her content and personal life, often cancelled her projects & even went so far as using her twitter account to attack Tamaki. They ended the stream in
tears with Tamaki begging her not to retire, to which Nobuhime responed "I have no choice but to give up, if this continues I'll break" (
archive).
- On 24 April, Kizuna Ai announced that she would split from upd8 and made a new company (still under Active8 though) herself called Kizuna Ai KK. Notably she stated that she was against the whole cloning shit. She took both Ai 2 and Ai 3 to her new company, granted them new identities of AiPii and Love-chan with different models and a separate youtube channel. She said this has been in the works for some time.
- On the same day as Oda Nobuhime's graduation, AniMare & Honey Strap announced their ending of relationship with upd8. This effectively spelt the end for the company. Most of their talents left afterwards/already left.
- Upd8 limbo-ed around until November where they finally filed for bankruptcy, allowing the few remaining members to keep their identity.
What happened after for vtubers under upd8
- After the split, Kizuna AI enjoyed some popularity, but the world left her behind, live stream started becoming the norms and scripted content vtubers started losing popularity. While she still enjoyed somewhat decent viewership on her videos, she's at her 5th year at this point and started considering her future as a vtuber. In
late 2021 she announced that she will be on indefinite hiatus after her Hello World concert on Feb 2022. And has been on hiatus since. However, she
held a
paid concert in February 2023, and upload a 2 minute 6th year
celebration video on Dec 1, 2022. No 7th year celebration for 2023.
- Oda Nobuhime later joined Hololive under the name Omaru Polka.
- Hololive AZki, initially managed by both upd8 and INNK, sadly did not escape mismanagement after exiting upd8, was very active on her PL account, created her own music group named La prière. She only started streaming regularly on her AZki channel around April 2023, one year after the disbandment of INNK.
- AyaMina sisters, one joined Hololive under Inugami Korone, the other one is rumored to be Nijisanji's Inui Touko, but no concrete evidence.
- Shibuya Hal, one of the few who actually stayed with upd8 until the very final days, went on to become one of the most recognized names in the vtuber industry and established his own corpo named Neo-Porte.
- Suou Patra - she was a pillar of 774 inc. until she went independent recently - 756k subscribers
- Tomari Mari - 477k subs, a decently popular independent vtuber who seems to have connections everywhere, participated in Shibuya Hal's Vsaikyou #1 and #2, collabed with
Ange Katrina of Nijisanji,
Matsuri of hololive, recently showed up in Fubuki's & Polka's
year end totsumachi and Kson's Offline Meet as
one of the guests That's as far as I know about him.
- Utai Makea - 455k subs, collabs alot with Holostars it seems.
- Omegasister - 375k subscribers, the other famous sister vtubers in JP beside HimeHina
- YuNi - a vsinger with 368k subs
- Inaba Haneru - 774 inc. - 354k subs
- Most are still active to various degrees of success, I saw like 10 retirements, not sure if they reincarnated or not.
In another timeline, upd8 didnt mismanage itself to oblivion and would become one of the big pillars of the industry with just the names they already had.
