Thank you, Geoff Keighley, for visiting COVER's office. We had a truly productive conversation, and I look forward to future discussions! I hope you enjoyed your time in Japan as much as I enjoyed meeting you.
Shigeaki Hayashi joined COVER Corporation in 2022 after serving as the head of console gaming and working as an art director at a social gaming company. He currently serves as the Head of the Creative Production Department and was appointed Senior Vice President in April 2025. Shigeaki Hayashi...
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One of the guys who got promoted earlier last month speaks about stuff, take with a grain of obvious corpo PR but it is interesting.
This guy is essentially the replacement for whoever it was oversaw many of the project cancellations from before, so you can blame him if your oshi gets her shit canned.
Here's a summary. It was one of my favorite streams of the year so far and re-watching/doing a write-up was nice weebspeak practice. Pretty difficult with everyone laughing loud as hell though.
The Oozora Subaru Lovey-Dovey Championship. Hosted by Marine and Miko, it was a quiz battle to see who loves Subaru the most. The participants were Noel, Watame, Bae and Su:
Quick rules:
Subaru herself was not in the stream. Marine told her to not watch and stay away so the participants could feel free to say anything they wanted to without limits.
The participants were shown a photo of Subaru and a situation. They then decided how best to respond to said situation. Because Subaru wasn't there, Miko was the judge instead. She would give them points based on how she imagined Subaru would feel about their answers. Marine felt that she could give an accurate rating due to being one of Subaru's best friends.
The winner would get a "Do anything you want with Subaru for 1 day" ticket
Marine ran a pre-stream poll to see who chat thinks would win. Noel had the majority of votes at 61%, then Su at 17%, Watame at 16% and Bae at the lowest with 6%.
Now for the "plot twist," Subaru started a stream at the same time with a very subtle thumbnail:
She did a free chat for the first 5 minutes, then very quickly switched to a watchalong of Marine's stream. She revealed that it wasn't Miko doing the ratings, but Subaru herself. She would rate the participants' answers and tell Miko her judgment in Discord, then Miko would tell that to the participants while pretending it was all her.
Bae:Call an ambulance and do CPR on Subaru while waiting.
100 points: If this ever happens, Subaru knows she can count on Bae. She could feel the love here.
Noel:Will donate her own heart so Subaru can get a heart transplant. Doesn't mind dying for her oshi but in exchange, Noel wants to have Subaru's heart.
-100 points: No need to be a hero.
Su:Subaru clearly has no hope of making it out alive. Su will lay down next to her so they can die together.
-100 points: Don't die. Just call the ambulance man.
Watame:Call an ambulance and fondle Subaru's ass while waiting, hoping it'll wake her up.
50 points: Was hilarious and Subaru might actually revive through sheer tsukkomi power to ask what the hell is wrong with her.
Subaru, Once Like the Sun, is Now as Energetic as a Dying Tree: View attachment 96681 (I didn't realize how much this looked like she hung herself, jesus christ Marine):
Watame:Put herself in a giant flowerpot with some dirt, hold a bouquet and tell Subaru: "Look! This is you! I am you right now! Remember how you bloomed like these flowers!"
1 point:This just made no sense. Subaru would be like what are you doing.
Su:Compliment Subaru a bunch non-stop, like how her collarbones look in this picture and how good she looks when depressed. Eventually she'll be fine as love takes time.
100 points: "Love takes time" is a great phrase. Su was amazing.
Bae:"Subaru... you good? Like really, you okay?" Would take her back home, let her talk if she wants to, feed her some good food and just hang out together, like watching movies or playing games.
100 points: Was wholesome as heck and grateful for Bae's love. Wants to eat her hotpot again
Noel:This Subaru is probably dead so Noel would bury her, become her fertilizer and eventually, a new Subaru grows from the ground.
1 point: Made no sense again but could feel Noel's love at least.
Noel again:The first answer was what Noel came up with while holding herself back. She later said her true answer was that she'd see depressed Subaru, would want to kidnap her and hide her away.
-100 points: Scary. Noel became a yokai for some reason.
Subaru Starts Acting Weird, Spreading Her Legs While Angrily Yelling and Rampaging Around: View attachment 96685
Bae:Do the same pose and yelling as Subaru, have someone take photos of them, make 100 copies and give them to Subaru as a gift. She knows Subaru would want someone to play around with her.
-100 points: That first part was perfect but the 2nd part ruined it. Subaru wouldn't want those photocopies at all, what would she do with them even?
Su:Will take a ton of photos and give them to Subaru after she calms down. Will potentially use them for blackmail. Subaru feels happy when getting bullied after all (?????????)
5 points: That's just terrifying and more like a demon than anything.
Watame:Will calm Subaru down by putting her in a camel clutch.
50 points: Appreciates the wrestling passion and the Hologra reference, though Subaru would probably die.
Noel:Would compliment Subaru on her V, then would form an S so they can be "VS." together. The perfect vtuber ship (????)
100 points: Subaru was dying cause this was the funniest response so far.
But Subaru joined the stream and said she was happy to see how much everyone loved her. While she knew they liked her, watching today's stream made her realize just how much they all think about her. She felt a little bad about the scoring system, but today was ton of fun and she loves all of them too. Marine took all of this to mean that everyone wins, so everyone was able to get a "Do Anything With Subaru for 1 Day" ticket.
Subaru was fine with it, but asked everyone to not go too far and please don't turn her into a flower. And you'd think it'd be obvious but if she gets a heart attack and collapses, please call the ambulance. She also got scared of Su again cause she said now that Subaru has seen this side of her, there's no reason to hold back anymore. So she'll probably become Noel 2 somewhere down the line.
TLDR everyone loves Subaru so everyone wins. Put me in the next one though and I beat all of them. Also this: View attachment 96716
Awesome work. My biggest issue to start was I came in like 20 minutes after it had started, I saw Marine's at like 80-85k CCV and Subaru at 60k CCV. It was the Vtuber version of walking in on someone in a very awkward situation and they have to go "so, there's an explanation for this." They broke the duck a couple of times with the jokes.
Was listening to Bae's stream a bit and she found out how much the Australian version of the Switch 2 was going to be and reacted really poorly. Since she was gone/out of the loop on the news, it's funny to see an honest reaction that poor. When it's basically a business expense and she's questioning it, it's kind of clear the pricing has gone poorly.
Depending on the poster that'll either be because Hololive Bad something something investors something something disagreement with management, OR that they don't even realise there are Japanese companies outside of Hololive to begin with. You're probably not gonna see much good-faith discussion about it since the entire conversation's gonna be poisoned by both the anti-corpo commies and the Orange Man Bad politisperging.
I know this has been memed to death already but I think we have the capacity to produce high quality prints here instead of having them shipped over inside disastrously expensive packaging.
Merch and IP licensing were two of Cover's biggest revenue generators just judging from their last two earnings reports - to the point where both far outstripped what they earned for concerts and live events.
IIRC though, they don't break down the revenue between JP and Overseas so it's kinda hard to determine whether these new tariffs (should they stay long term) will have a material effect on Cover's revenue approach - if it ends up not being negligible and they need to make up the lost "growth" from diminished merch stream from another revenue source. Do they push for more paid concerts and lives? More non-merch IP deals and partnerships?
Edit 2: On the plus side I got a really old vod of her showing off orca pictures, and if I learn how to archive billibilli, there are more old streams on there.
I know this has been memed to death already but I think we have the capacity to produce high quality prints here instead of having them shipped over inside disastrously expensive packaging.
I never bought too much straight out of China, but the couple of eBay purchases I did came with lower shipping charges than sending the package across the same State. So much damage was done from deals like that which were destructive on so many smaller industries but agreed in DC to prop up some Wall Street firms.
I do absolutely have sympathy for those caught in the middle of this. It's not quite having to do Chemo because you have Cancer, but the economies need a root canal and, well, there's some pain that goes with it.
I feel bad for Fubuki in all this. She's a big Western Media fan, Cover is big enough they're regularly getting involved in that marketing in Japan, and Hollywood is literally in a self-inflicted spiral of destruction. She's not going to get anything good to watch most years for at least 2-3 more.
Merch and IP licensing were two of Cover's biggest revenue generators just judging from their last two earnings reports - to the point where both far outstripped what they earned for concerts and live events.
IIRC though, they don't break down the revenue between JP and Overseas so it's kinda hard to determine whether these new tariffs (should they stay long term) will have a material effect on Cover's revenue approach - if it ends up not being negligible and they need to make up the lost "growth" from diminished merch stream from another revenue source. Do they push for more paid concerts and lives? More non-merch IP deals and partnerships?
There's going to be a hit, but I imagine a lot of Merch Buyers in the States are going to properly just send Super Chats for a bit. That literally just happened with Fuwamoco's 1 million merch drop that just happened. It's also entirely possible the tariffs are down to like 25% before anything ships. Dynamic situations and all of that.
She has to personally approve the tariff charge on every single Dino-Gura sold - it's not like Yagoo can be bothered to do it.
Anybody else notice that chat was basically completely unusable during Gura's graduation concert?
Apparently that was because the chat was moving at 108 messages/sec. This is over 2.5x the chat speed of Aqua's or Coco's graduation streams, despite the fact that Aqua's stream had almost 4x the CCV of Gura's. This means that the EN viewers were spamming the chat at least 8 times as much as the weak JP fans did. It also probably makes it the fastest moving chat in Vtuber stream history.
I feel a perverse sense of satisfaction in knowing that despite EN being significantly dwarfed in audience size by JP at this point, at the very least we will never lose to them when it comes to mashing our face across a keyboard when our Oshis are streaming.
Edit 2: On the plus side I got a really old vod of her showing off orca pictures, and if I learn how to archive billibilli, there are more old streams on there.
Reminder that merch of graduated members tends to be axed, since the member is no longer under contract they'd need to make some new contract to establish revenue share. (Which is obviously what gura did with her re-release of the plushie)
Reminder that merch of graduated members tends to be axed, since the member is no longer under contract they'd need to make some new contract to establish revenue share. (Which is obviously what gura did with her re-release of the plushie)
Was listening to Bae's stream a bit and she found out how much the Australian version of the Switch 2 was going to be and reacted really poorly. Since she was gone/out of the loop on the news, it's funny to see an honest reaction that poor. When it's basically a business expense and she's questioning it, it's kind of clear the pricing has gone poorly.
I know you are too angry too think rationally but this is more on GSC side than Cover
I still remember the days after Rushia got terminated they still did promotions with her Figma and Nendoroids and only took it down because they received too much flak from everyone
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