![]() ![]() Per Playboard’s estimates, eight of the top 10 YouTube tips earners since January 2020 are Vtubers - and five of them are under the Hololive umbrella. In exchange for giving up unilateral control of the IP, however, they’ve gained unprecedented fan loyalty. And fans have deep enough attachments to specific actors that it’s impossible to further monetize a character when the original human behind it leaves. In practice, they’ve yielded the question of who “owns” the character to the fans. Fellow Japanese Vtuber-specialized agencies Hololive and Nijisanji, representing dozens to over a hundred Vtuber content creators respectively, have opted to retire and “graduate” characters when their voice actors leave the company instead of replacing them wholesale. ![]() In the wake of the incident, not only was voice actress Nozomi Kasuga unmasked as the voice behind the project, the people involved in the first act launched a whole new company, with original character designer Eriko Matsumoto as its new CEO. These attempts to “clone” Kizuna AI were controversial, especially as rumors spread that the original voice actress was let go in the process. Her production company, Activ8, has attempted to broaden Kizuna Ai’s appeal in 2019 by bringing in more voice actresses (and tripling up on avatars) who “played” her - the closest parallel would be watching different actors take on the same theater role. This practice is now routinely emulated by her peers and successors in the space.Īnother principle also commonly practiced by Vtubers is more of an accident on Kizunai Ai’s part - and deeply tied to the politics of content creation and IP ownership. For much of her career, Kizuna kept her support staff and real-world actress a mystery, which helps sell the fantasy to the viewers who develop parasocial relationships with her. In Kizuna’s case, she claims to be an artificial intelligence come to life. Deliberately: an anime-style avatar with a fictional backstory. Since 2016, Kizuna Ai set many of the expectations and practices now expected of Vtubers, both deliberate and accidental. But what’s now commonly considered a “Vtuber” has less in common with her Pixar-like 3D avatar, and more with the fully anime style Kizuna Ai, a virtual idol made by a Japanese production company that now boasts over 4 million YouTube subscribers. vlogger Ami Yamato, who launched her YouTube channel in late 2011. ![]() The first known instance of this phenomenon is largely credited to U.K. By and large, developments in streaming and content creation software have brought the technology into the hands of individual content creators and smaller agencies. You can now theoretically make a virtual avatar like Calliope Mori’s with something as simple as a smartphone app and laptop. ![]() But the same effect can now be achieved with a virtual reality setup and software suite that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars instead of hundreds of thousands. The use of a virtual avatar was at one point prohibitively expensive, requiring industrial motion-capture setups, and professional teams of cinematographers and software engineers. Virtual fameĬontent creators using representational avatars is not, in itself, a particularly new phenomena, though the mutations in technology arguably are. Vtubers have splashed down on the Western internet, and in 2020, everybody’s feeling the waves. But the audience is real, and their money was withdrawn from actual banking and credit accounts. And the anime-style avatar she dons while rapping and drinking wine on stream is not what she really looks like. The more Mori protested, the more people donated.Ĭalliope Mori is, of course, not her real name. Each one came with a message from a fan, which she promised to read in full “even if it takes me six hours.” Over the course of half an hour, at least $10,000 flooded in, with the pace only increasing as viewers fought to one-up each other in their donations. Mori started panicking as the crimson notifications continued flooding her view. An explosion of red banners overtook her chat, denoting that her viewers were leaving her, at minimum, tips of $100 or more. As she played, her chat suddenly started spiraling out of control. And while not the most expensive war in total, the exuberance of its armaments left its primary target, a pink-haired digital goth girl, aghast.Ĭalliope Mori was, at that point, a newly minted streamer who was enjoying an indie survival game called Mad Father. 18, 2020, the friendliest war ever conducted between Canadians and Americans commenced. ![]()
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