Please don't share this anywhere, but I work at Cover HQ and this is what it's like to be a guy there:
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But really it's mostly the fact that having male talents in what is essentially an idol company is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It's not that they NEED collab partners to survive, but having roughly 90% of talents actively pretending you don't exist is a serious limitation on potential content. Not to mention that those same talents all have rabid fans that will harass you for even being in the same company as their oshi. If I were a male vtuber I'd still rather apply there than Niji but I can understand those who do the opposite since they at least treat you equally (even if equally shitty) and the company culture isn't actively hostile to your existence. I think if Holostars is going to be successful on the same scale as Live they have to make a change. Whether they SHOULD make a change, or what that change should be, I don't really have an opinion on.
Hence why Phase, Idol, and all the other small corpos refuse men outright. Start trying to usher men in and your big whales swim off, and your revenue goes into the toilet. Those people that spam fishman about males in Phase are really tone-deaf for that reason; even if he did want male talents it'd likely be financial suicide.