I've been trying to get motivated to post here more but I've been kinda checked out in general because reasons, but I have been looking through my cohost data dump and trying to decide the best way to post and continue my effortposts about math and shit.

Manwhile, has it really been almost three years since I last talked about labor as it pertains to streaming? Also that's post id 1 which is pretty funny.

Anyway, in the intervening time some interesting things have happened. Besides the increasingly draconian S&P both Youtube and Twitch are enforcing, the biggest shift has been a move for certain performers to actually start being able to claim their credits. Yes, I'm talking about vtubers again, and my earlier interest in vtubing as an industry beyond just watching a few streamers has been vindicated because as the vtubing industry has grown and settled into a more mature market, we've seen the performers on the cutting edge of both positive and negative shifts and especially we're seeing the limits of industrialized streaming, at least in the recognized western style of "mugging at the camera and shouting while playing a vidcon" that grew out of Let's Play.

The first point I want to talk about is a maybe-not-seismic-but-still-pretty-major shift in attitudes around claiming credits. The norm in corporate vtubing to date has been, as I've talked about, to prevent performers from claiming credits for a given role. This is jarring given that performance credits are the fundamental building block of any actor or theatrical performer's portfolio, and when companies contractually bar their performers from claiming credits for roles they have played continuously for possibly six or seven years, that is an act of violence against those performers as workers who may eventually want to move on to other roles. Hiding this information not only contractually but by pushing "not talking about past lives" as a norm among fans has been one of the biggest weapons large corporations like Cover or ANYCOLOR (or Sony!!) has had to control their performers. When the performer who played Amano Pikamee left VOMS (by all accounts a rather looser company than eg ANYCOLOR, which was started mainly as a passion project by GYARI) and joined Vshojo as Henya, she not only did not put out any information indicating such but even went so far as to try (unsuccessfully) to hide some of her more well-known mannerisms だよ.

Some high-profile "graduations"/reincarnations like Pikamee's into Henya, or Noir Vesper's back to his original persona of Randon Neuring, started loosening some of those restraints among the fans, but the partial collapse due to mismanagement of Nijisanji EN leading to the termination of and legal battle with the performer behind Nijisanji's former Selen Tatsuki and her reincarnation as Dokibird, who laid out everything she was legally and safely able to, and the groundswell of support from her fans in actively promoting Doki as the erstwhile Selen really blew the doors off. On one hand, contractual norms have started shifting; when idol corp sold out to Brave Group, the idol performers were given what had previously been considered a basically unthinkable offer, to be able to leave the company while buying out their own IP, with the result that several performers, including their major star Rin Penrose, were able to not only go independent amicably but were able to keep not only their credits but their entire performance history as that character. Maybe more importantly, the former fannish norm of hiding "past life" or "reincarnation" information or, at most, being coy to the point of incomprehensible about it, has largely vanished. Some performers have been clear they would prefer not to have such information passed around, and that is largely respected, but otherwise it is no longer treated as a violation to let people know that, for instance, Amelia Watson is now Dooby3D (while still apparently on roster with Hololive for future occasional guest performances as Ame!), or that Ceres Fauna, who recently announced that she will be leaving Hololive, will soon be once again found performing under her former persona of Lemonleaf.

This is, of course, fantastic, because this means that the performers can leave if the working conditions are no longer cromulent or the company "has to change direction" - more on that in a moment - and don't stand to lose everything they've built. Opportunities like Rin Penrose's to take their entire body of work with them, or Dooby's to maintain connection and be able to openly pursue multiple roles, stand to become more common, and we should expect to see performers like Caitlin Meyers or Karen Calanni, who already have established careers, at some point being able to add these rather substantial roles to their imdb pages or other portfolios, instead of having large, questionable gaps.

The other part we've seen, however, is company growth beginning to plateau. The biggest recent example is Cover Corp's 2023 IPO and the public earnings statements showing that streaming doesn't pay the bills. Bearing in mind, Cover has a market cap of just shy of 1B USD, which certainly indicates a sustainable business, but investors do not want sustainable, they want growth, and at the end of the day the primary product are... well, video game streamers. The majority of vtuber streams are not that different in character than good old facecam Let's Plays or reaction streams, of which there are already numerous. Couple that with the higher technical threshold and required investment to get started and run sustainably as a vtuber compared to a traditional streamer, and that vtubers are still comparitively niche - Ironmouse's ongoing subscriber count race with Kai Cenat notwithstanding - and companies like Cover are looking other directions to grow their market.

This is causing its own problems, because a percentage of the performers are not interested in changing directions! This leads back to the first part of the post; with performers and fans both more willing to follow performers who leave a role to a new role as an independent performer or with a smaller company like Vshojo, this makes simply jumping ship as Cover and ANYCOLOR (and some smaller names) try once again to resuscitate the dream of "virtual idols" far more attractive. The companies may well be a day late and a dollar short, as the relative control over the perfomers that is typical of the traditional idol industry was a big part of why the restrictions on claiming credits were so firmly hammered into place in the early days of vtubing. One can hope that things continue to loosen; even performers who may well find the "virtual idol" landscape attractive will be better served if they can move to a new role, instead of having to make the lose-lose decision of staying with a bad company or losing their careers.