Since its launch in 2019, HOLOSTARS has been active for almost seven years. With the debuts of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Gens, followed by UPROAR!!, it has grown into a group with a total of 12 currently active members and over the course of seven years, their activities went beyond streaming on YouTube, as they joined events, exhibitions, collaborations, and live shows on site.
However, the current state of the HOLOSTARS business has forced us as a company to have repeated discussions about how to maintain HOLOSTARS in a sustainable manner. We considered the future direction of the group’s activities from various perspectives. Ultimately, we have arrived at the conclusion that changing the management structure in a way that fits the current status of HOLOSTARS’ activities is unavoidable.
As a result, the company-led activities of the group, which have progressed alongside the individual activities of each talent, will be coming to a close. From this fiscal year onward, activity policies will shift to mainly focus on individual activities. Moreover, as we will reallocate certain resources, some of our support will be limited or conclude entirely.
That sucks and is pretty shitty from Cover tbh. They’ve never really given Holostars the same attention and promotion as Hololive and now they’re basically putting the blame on Holostars for not living up to their Hololive counterpart.
Effectively making them indies will probably only make the “current state” worse. Just give them a severance package or something and let them actually go indie while the boys keep their characters. Giving them little to no support, but still taking a cut of their income is fucked up.
Cover can probably easily subsidize the costs of keeping Holostars going properly with the profits from Hololive too. They’re not short on money. It really boils down to Cover’s willingness to actually make something of it.
To be honest, for how little profit they made, their treatment wasn’t even that bad. Especially in the early days, Miyabi said a couple times how Yagoo was very supportive even when the branch had extremely little following. They even had a countdown live for a couple years, and I felt like it had the same effort put into them as the girls’ side.
I can’t say for sure, but I personally think if it was 100% Yagoo’s choice to make, things would’ve stayed like this. Unfortunately he doesn’t own all the stocks and he probably can’t justify spending that much on a low-income project to the other shareholders.
I’m not that knowledgeable about it and my source is Reddit so take it as you will, but it probably still has to do with shareholders. Their characters are company property and they can’t just give them away for free, even if Yagoo wanted to.
Hopefully at least the income cut is massively reduced since otherwise it’s basically “being indie, but worse”.
Yeah, but why is the profit low? Female vtubers definitely are more popular, but Holostars performing badly is unique to Holopro in the vtuber industry. There are tons of succesful male vtubers. I doubt the talents are the issue here.
Idk, it felt always way more janky to me.
Yeah probably, as always. Selling shares was never a good idea.
I mean, they totally can. Other companies have done so before and so have they with the whole HoloCN thing IIRC (or at least, offered).
I’d say it’s more that male Vtubers performing VERY well is almost unique to Nijisanji. Pretty sure every other male corpo VTuber is less popular than Stars. My theory is that at Niji they lean more into the BFE side, while Star streams are more “gender-neutral” and as a consequence attract less gachikois, but I haven’t really watched enough Niji to form a concrete opinion.
I’m pretty sure Cover started with Venture Capital and they were 100% forced to sell either shares or the whole company. It was bound to happen since the foundation of the company, they didn’t choose to do it later.
I personally can’t remember of a company that did that without closing down (outside of VShojo where their IPs were their property from the start), and the HoloCN disaster happened when they weren’t publicly traded yet. If you know of a situation where that happened in a public company I’d be interested in knowing, my argument on this is just based on hearsay and anecdotal evidence so if it’s a misconception I’d be glad to be corrected.
Specifically publicly traded companies I don’t know, but Vtubers like Nene Amano (production kawaii, after it shut down) or Rin Penrose (idol corp, after being merged with Brave Group they were given the choice to leave or stay) are examples, though probably not for free.
But yeah, being publicly traded would make things harder (though the largest shareholder is still Yagoo and another Cover employee comes in 2nd)