Nijisanji L Collection

[Nenélove]

What kinda company was Activ8 back then? Nowadays it's clearly entertainment (more specifically, pretending to be relevant by pointing at its past trendsetting role and current failures without mentioning the "Failure" part), but if they were initially a tech company doing tech demonstration (which I believe is the case, but I cannot actually find anything clearly stating this), them fumbling after stumbling on the entertainment line is understandable.

I mean, it can clearly be done better, as demonstrated by Cover, but Activ8's tech was so far ahead of its competition, there's an implication of tech being thoroughly entrenched and entertainment just not being considered the point of the company at all.

That Upd8 only became a thing after Hololive, Nijisanji and .LIVE all already ran half a dozen talents or more rather demonstrates how much of an afterthought entertainment was.

While it clearly fumbled an opportunity, it's more understandable if their undeniably cutting edge tech was actually theirs (Cover's tech was theirs, of course, but cutting edge... uh, yeah. No). It'd mean that they genuinely put in the engineering work first, everything else was just for showing off said work.

The problem with that approach being, of course, that there's no obvious monetisation avenue. And with engineering being so highly entrenched and genuinely intensive in terms of manpower and finances, swerving towards entertainment was a lot harder for them than it was for Cover's literal handful of people on a budget made of dreams and wishful thinking.

Profitability would also have been more difficult to achieve since the money input was so much greater.

tl;dr: Activ8 may arguably have failed because its tech was too good.

Was their tech really that advanced? To me activ8's only accolade is being the people who popularized this virtual personality thing and put a name on it. But the tech was already there, full body motion capture had been a thing since the 90s, there had been a good handful of corpos who had used virtual characters as mascots before.

Kizuna's deal was tapping into a more personalized experience, she wasn't just some corpo mascot or a bot manipulating a human voice like Miku.

But even then vtubers in that era were a different beast to what they are now. A lot of the customs, culture and expectations we have today only come into widespread usage after other corpos began jumping on it.

Activ8 failed because they refused to adapt to changes introduced by their competition, and they had absolutely god awful, worthless management.

 

[MerelyTourist]

Like you said, you're a geniune outsider to the industry and so your frame of reference to vtubers was Mel and the whores bitching about her.
But the general genesis of vtubing even in the west will always be more weeb adjecent projects like Kizuna, weaboo faggotry built this industry and will keep nurturing it till it dies, even Mel spergs out about hentai which is a part of more coomer weaboo culture

I wouldn't call it frame of reference, it's more like first passing encounter. First streams that popped in my recommends and i actually stayed to watch and subbed were Selen on youtube and Geega&Mouse on twitch.

 

[Awoogers]

i think we should kill tourists actually

 

[Nenélove]

I wouldn't call it frame of reference, it's more like first passing encounter. First streams that popped in my recommends and i actually stayed to watch and subbed were Selen on youtube and Geega&Mouse on twitch.

Holy normalfag

 

[El Rrata]

i think we should kill tourists actually

Get around fedposting rules with this one weird trick!

Mods hate him!

 

[tgmslc]

Maybe we should make our own collaborative treatise on the history of (western) vtubing?

We'd probably do the best of it out of any community site. Anywhere else is either too much of a cheerleader for this or that talent/corpo or just too full of retarded trolls. TVA's got a nice balance of gay cheerleaders (like me, for HoloPromise lol), tourists with vague memories of whatever coomerbait they first clicked on, or actual old-schoolers who haven't felt genuine joy since 1997.

I saw Kizuna, Siro and Mirai Akari a couple of times before 2020, after 2020 it was all Korone, Miko and Fubuki shit, later in the year I saw count dankula talking about Melody, and it was mostly just in the context of angry whores seething about her, not her being interesting or popular enough to get in my feed.

I think it just depends. I fell out of vtubing completey after Upd8 started imploding & Kaguya Luna stopped posting her one video per season. What got me back in right at the start of COVID quarantine in March 2020 was a random clip of Korone playing Resident Evil.


Korone is great and cute and funny so I instantly got back in basically & had her playing Doom 2016 up on my third monitor while I did my wfh tech support job

Basically every vtuber started getting attention right after myth was announced/debuted.

Truly tourist take, I'm sorry. Fubuki and Korone were both well over 900k subs by the time Myth debuted & Hololive had a several talents over 500k. Kiryu Coco was also doing real hard work introducing western fans to Hololive back then. Myth may have supercharged the western sphere but there were already lots of overseas fans by the time Gura came along & shot straight to 1 milli.

What kinda company was Activ8 back then? Nowadays it's clearly entertainment (more specifically, pretending to be relevant by pointing at its past trendsetting role and current failures without mentioning the "Failure" part), but if they were initially a tech company doing tech demonstration (which I believe is the case, but I cannot actually find anything clearly stating this), them fumbling after stumbling on the entertainment line is understandable.

I mean, it can clearly be done better, as demonstrated by Cover, but Activ8's tech was so far ahead of its competition, there's an implication of tech being thoroughly entrenched and entertainment just not being considered the point of the company at all.

That Upd8 only became a thing after Hololive, Nijisanji and .LIVE all already ran half a dozen talents or more rather demonstrates how much of an afterthought entertainment was.

While it clearly fumbled an opportunity, it's more understandable if their undeniably cutting edge tech was actually theirs (Cover's tech was theirs, of course, but cutting edge... uh, yeah. No). It'd mean that they genuinely put in the engineering work first, everything else was just for showing off said work.

The problem with that approach being, of course, that there's no obvious monetisation avenue. And with engineering being so highly entrenched and genuinely intensive in terms of manpower and finances, swerving towards entertainment was a lot harder for them than it was for Cover's literal handful of people on a budget made of dreams and wishful thinking.

Profitability would also have been more difficult to achieve since the money input was so much greater.

tl;dr: Activ8 may arguably have failed because its tech was too good.

When they started introducing multiple actors for Kizuna AI it really did reveal just how mercenary their entire endeavor was. They were only ever concerned with building The Brand and IP and tech, though that eventually came back to bite them hard in the ass.

 

[Seth]

Truly tourist take, I'm sorry. Fubuki and Korone were both well over 900k subs by the time Myth debuted & Hololive had a several talents over 500k. Kiryu Coco was also doing real hard work introducing western fans to Hololive back then. Myth may have supercharged the western sphere but there were already lots of overseas fans by the time Gura came along & shot straight to 1 milli.

Conversation was about western vtubers.

 

[Awoogers]

vtubers became known in the west because miko said the n word which then saved her career and skyrocketed holostocks back then

 

[Nenélove]

The boom was not a single moment or person, it was many moments and many people, but look at any chart which display sub counts, Google searches or average CCV and it is undeniable that while the boom started around the time coco debuted and even some months before in 2019, the true wild expansion only happened because Holo, which was getting popular with EOPs, actually catered to them and fostered that audience with a actual EN gen, I don't think many people would've stuck around after COVID to watch vtubers they barely even understood just because "le memez".

 

[Aquatic Novellite]

I measure the impact of Myth in /vt/s.

Myth caused the creation of one (1) board dedicated to vtubers on 4chan after /jp/ was overran by tourists.

Everyone else sits at zero.

 

[Malchior]

This is the version of history that tracks most for me. Kizuna AI and Upd8 were the ones finding out where all the boundaries were in 2017-2018.

Like whether people just wanted 3-6 minute videos of a cute anime girl or if they would watch 30+ minutes of that same cute anime girl playing a video game (first "Inside" video i wanna say was spring 2017?). Or whether some other actor could skinwalk the model and fans would accept it (turns out Hard No, see the Multiple Ai's drama circa summer 2019).

I understand that Zentraya debuted on Twitch even earlier doing VR Chat stuff but I've always avoided Twitch so I couldn't tell you anything about that. And besides, Zentraya was hella niche whereas Kizuna Ai went so mainstream that she once got to flirt onstage with famous actor Christopher Waltz.

Goddamn, 2019 was a strange year...

If we talking "modern vtubers" Kizuna and Kaguya were great cornerstones, and if memory serves me right (fuck im feeling old by the minute with this) Kizuna was the seiso one while Luna was the unruly one, being vulgar, saying shit and at times doing it while drunk (its easy to see images of her with a strong zero in hands because of that and her collors being similar of the drink)

vtubers became known in the west because miko said the n word which then saved her career and skyrocketed holostocks back then

I would say one of the first times I saw a "huge" knowledge of the west on vtubers was after this clip of Kizuna, same vibe as Miko even if with a lighter word.


*edit: thanks youtube, that really needed a age restriction...

In my snapshot of internet, i never saw any mentions of Kizuna (or Nyanners and others), but Mel came up here and there few times. I found out about her from an article about porn industry and tuned in on her CB stream for like 5 minutes back then. Then i stumbled upon mentions of her again and saw the very first one-page version of vshojo site. I've got into watching vtubers only like year and half later.
So i can understand if someone will point out Mel over Kizuna, but then you're just one vtuber wiki page away from other vshojo members who also got big in 2020. So yeah, no matter how you look at it, it's just lazy. Same as previous joke of a whitepaper. Maybe we should make our own collaborative treatise on the history of (western) vtubing?

Man... your dick being erect isnt a sign for you to follow were it's pointing out...

 

[tgmslc]

Conversation was about western vtubers.

The boom was not a single moment or person, it was many moments and many people, but look at any chart which display sub counts, Google searches or average CCV and it is undeniable that while the boom started around the time coco debuted and even some months before in 2019, the true wild expansion only happened because Holo, which was getting popular with EOPs, actually catered to them and fostered that audience with a actual EN gen, I don't think many people would've stuck around after COVID to watch vtubers they barely even understood just because "le memez".

I think Kiryu Coco is the single most important person in the history of vtubing after maybe Kizuna AI. It really can't be understated how much groundwork she laid for the western scene. Her bringing in a different Holomem every week & translating back and forth for the guest & the EN audience was the first time that EOP's had live access to the big super-popular JP talents. Without Coco-kaichou doing meme reviews with Matsuri, Fubuki, Roboco, etc. there's no chance that Myth has almost 50k viewers watching their debuts live. And talking like the western audience spontaneously condensed out of thin air upon Myth's debut is, frankly, retarded.

Meanwhile Nijisanji absolutely dropped the ball in 2020, deciding to launch a branch in India of all places and trying to rebrand them as NijiEN only after HoloEN had been announced.

 

[Security]

or actual old-schoolers who haven't felt genuine joy since 1997.

Hey now, it was 2003 that I last felt genuine joy.

 

[Nenélove]

I think Kiryu Coco is the single most important person in the history of vtubing after maybe Kizuna AI. It really can't be understated how much groundwork she laid for the western scene. Her bringing in a different Holomem every week & translating back and forth for the guest & the EN audience was the first time that EOP's had live access to the big super-popular JP talents. Without Coco-kaichou doing meme reviews with Matsuri, Fubuki, Roboco, etc. there's no chance that Myth has almost 50k viewers watching their debuts live. And talking like the western audience spontaneously condensed out of thin air upon Myth's debut is, frankly, retarded.

Meanwhile Nijisanji absolutely dropped the ball in 2020, deciding to launch a branch in India of all places and trying to rebrand them as NijiEN only after HoloEN had been announced.

Meh? I think Holo would've gotten into EN regardless and if it wasn't them then it'd be Niji, the true main character of the boom is COVID. It doesn't matter how much groundwork coco laid if there weren't millions of bored EOPs ready to consoom.

 

[Seth]

I think Kiryu Coco is the single most important person in the history of vtubing after maybe Kizuna AI. It really can't be understated how much groundwork she laid for the western scene. Her bringing in a different Holomem every week & translating back and forth for the guest & the EN audience was the first time that EOP's had live access to the big super-popular JP talents. Without Coco-kaichou doing meme reviews with Matsuri, Fubuki, Roboco, etc. there's no chance that Myth has almost 50k viewers watching their debuts live. And talking like the western audience spontaneously condensed out of thin air upon Myth's debut is, frankly, retarded.

Meanwhile Nijisanji absolutely dropped the ball in 2020, deciding to launch a branch in India of all places and trying to rebrand them as NijiEN only after HoloEN had been announced.

Not sure if we're talking about the same thing here. I am saying that western vtubers such as zen,code miko, ash, nyanner, silvervale etc got a big boost in numbers after myth was announced/debuted. No one said that myth got extra famous out of thin air. I at least am saying western vtubing got popularized because of myth. How myth got popular is another story.

 

[tgmslc]

Meh? I think Holo would've gotten into EN regardless and if it wasn't them then it'd be Niji, the true main character of the boom is COVID. It doesn't matter how much groundwork coco laid if there weren't millions of bored EOPs ready to consoom.

I agree, but in the timeline we inhabit it's Hololive that pulls the trigger first and it's been pretty heavily implied by everyone involved that Cover only felt pressured to do so by the strong overseas response to Coco's meme reviews - including a super active Reddit community. If Nijisanji had debuted LazuLight instead of NijiIN in 2006, there's every chance that the first gen of NA Holo fans jump ship and completely change the course of history.

Not sure if we're talking about the same thing here. I am saying that western vtubers such as zen,code miko, ash, nyanner, silvervale etc got a big boost in numbers after myth was announced/debuted. No one said that myth got extra famous out of thin air. I at least am saying western vtubing got popularized because of myth. How myth got popular is another story.

I mean, maybe?? I think pointing at Myth is missing the actual target, though; again, I feel like Kiryu Coco opening successful & popular corpo vtubing up to EOP viewers did way more for the western scene than Myth debuting. I'd even go so far as to say that giving the credit for the rise of western vtubing to Myth instead of Kiryu Coco is putting the cart before the horse. Or the dragon, whatever.

 

[Awoogers]

I agree, but in the timeline we inhabit it's Hololive that pulls the trigger first and it's been pretty heavily implied by everyone involved that Cover only felt pressured to do so by the strong overseas response to Coco's meme reviews - including a super active Reddit community. If Nijisanji had debuted LazuLight instead of NijiIN in 2006, there's every chance that the first gen of NA Holo fans jump ship and completely change the course of history.

2006?

youre saying we could have had michael jordan as a vtuber?

 

[tgmslc]

2006?

youre saying we could have had michael jordan as a vtuber?

 

[El Rrata]

Meh? I think Holo would've gotten into EN regardless and if it wasn't them then it'd be Niji, the true main character of the boom is COVID. It doesn't matter how much groundwork coco laid if there weren't millions of bored EOPs ready to consoom.

Coco's impact on the West is massively overstated. Normies like Sodapoppin were watching Korone and Miko clips before Myth came around, not Coco. Coco was only enjoyed by people already in the community. Kizuna Ai first broke into the Western normie-sphere, then Korone and Miko paved the way to actually legitimize VTubers as funny anime girls that streamed, and then Myth exploded late that same year.

 

[MerelyTourist]

I think Kiryu Coco is the single most important person in the history of vtubing after maybe Kizuna AI. It really can't be understated how much groundwork she laid for the western scene. Her bringing in a different Holomem every week & translating back and forth for the guest & the EN audience was the first time that EOP's had live access to the big super-popular JP talents. Without Coco-kaichou doing meme reviews with Matsuri, Fubuki, Roboco, etc. there's no chance that Myth has almost 50k viewers watching their debuts live. And talking like the western audience spontaneously condensed out of thin air upon Myth's debut is, frankly, retarded.

Fair point too. I think there is at least handful of key people who facilitated vtubing boom of 2020. And there are other historically important people, i.e. Doki's importance in no way is lesser than Coco's. And there are smaller people could turn out to be way more important than you'd assume, like recent Shondo case. Then we have to begrudgingly include Luxiem in this VIP list too.