Moving this to general because it's not exactly Phase Connect related anymore:
I do think, with how much bigger the hobby has become, that open applications will become unsustainable in general soon and scouting will become more common. Out of those 3000 hopefuls I would assume at least 2750 are wildly unfitting applicants uncharismatically rambling into $10 headsets, and someone's got to sort through all that shit. For an established corpo it's much easier to proactively send out emails to people they can already trust to know what they're doing.
Oddly, the opposite seems to have been the case, with e.g. Cover scouting (arguably) Sora and Roboco and definitely Okayu, Korone, Mio, AZKi, Rushia and Pekora, but not so much in more recent gens (maybe the old NND talent pool is drying up).
You
need to scout early on because, well, who's gonna audition for a literal no name corp? Well, okay, even those get hundreds of applications for some reason, so let me rephrase: Which actually
good streamers are going to audition for a literal no name corp?
Later on, well, you
can still scout, and I have no doubt that a corp seeing a streamer with superstar potential will still take the first step and not wait for an application, but it's no longer an absolute necessity.
And to be blunt, nobody's going to watch 3000 audition videos. They'll look at the E-Mail, cross reference whether it comes from someone with some experience (No? Into the trash it goes), check the E-Mail text whether it's retarded (Yes? Into the trash it goes), cross reference the leftovers whether they're radioactive (Yes? Into the trash it goes), and only
then are they going to watch the thirty or so audition videos left over.
Granted, they might skip the checking for radiation hazards step.
