It's been a while since I made a V-Tuber news post, but the events of the past two days made it pretty clear that doing so now is necessary.
Sakamata Chloe, a member of Hololive JP's sixth generation, 'Secret Society holoX' (usually just called holoX), will be 'concluding her channel activities', similarly to Amelia Watson, on January 25th, 2025. Laplus Darkness, another member of holoX explains that she understands why Chloe is leaving, because even she says the amount of work that she expected from Hololive is a lot more than she previously expected, and that workload is a lot of why Chloe has chosen to leave.
The big news that got me to want to make this post today is that Ceres Fauna, a member of Hololive EN's second generation 'Council' (now 'Promise' with the graduation of Sana Tsukumo and addition of IryS to the group), will be graduating from Hololive on January 3rd, 2025. She isn't planning on leaving the door open with the affiliate status, like Amelia and Chloe are/have, once she leaves, that is the last that we will see of the Ceres Fauna persona. She specifically states that her reason for graduation is 'disagreement with management, and that she liked being an idol, that she was getting more comfortable with singing. This is notable because with Amelia and Minato Aqua, who have both left, Aqua choosing to graduate, their reasons for leaving were moreso for the sake of their creativity, as Amelia, now dooby3D, has an entire motion capture studio in her home that she mostly wasn't allowed to use in Hololive, and Aqua's problems were with the workload outside of streaming, which leads to something that I actually didn't know until last night.
Cover Corp went public this year, and Motoaki Tanigo, also known as Yagoo, was essentially forced to make Cover go public or be forced to sell the company. Cover was originally a tech company that only started the V-Tubing aspects of things because the person behind Tokino Sora wanted to become a virtual idol. This was done with the help of venture capital money, and because more people are learning this, a large portion of the viewerbase is blaming this new string of graduations and leaving on the investors pushing the girls to lean more and more into the idol aspects of being a vtuber, when a large portion of the fanbase mostly watches streams, and doesn't really care about the concerts. Who knows where this will take us, but Cover Corp going public, and Fauna graduating when there weren't any real signs that she was having problems is going to stain Cover for the foreseeable future. If the investors try to push Cover towards Nijisanji's route, I think everyone will simply be pissed out of their mind and the company will crash and burn for the sake of investors' short term gain.
I have seen conflicting reports of Sakamata Chloe's PL, but here are both of Fauna's channels. The non-ASMR channel has exploded in subscriber count within the past 18 hours since her announcement, as it started at 71k subscribers and has exploded to over 200k subscribers since the announcement of her graduation.
As someone that don't watch vtubers I'm curious, wouldn't it be better to go at it as an independent? Or is there technicalities involved that prevents this girls from starting at the bottom with maybe a jpeg avatar?
These girls STARTED as indies and applied to join Hololive once auditions came up. A lot of them were either non-vtuber content creators or already vtubers, some of the JP members are ex-idols, a few of the original JP members actually have Hololive as their first real job, as they auditioned during their senior years of high school.
There are a lot of reasons why someone would want to go corporate, but some easy reasons are for boosted reach, a built-in audience that will support you, not having to handle merch yourself and more funds to do certain projects that would be very expensive to do as an independent vtuber. There's also just always having people to do collab streams with in the other members of your agency, but these girls have mostly already been content creators and wanted to join Hololive.
The girls also make a lot of money, but a lot of the girls put that money basically right back into their streams/content, but others save more.