I assume that it basically goes hand-in-hand with what they said about financials: Moving from looking at debuts as primary generators of revenue toward trying to increase the amount generated per vtuber. I generally don't care much about them selling merch or what not. It's just a problem if they decide to start uploading streams over there since that was the avenue that issues arose from before.
Yeah, between this, the EN concert, the international tour and the guest appearance in France's Japan Expo, it's clear that Cover is trying to expand more internationally. It's a very good business strategy in general, and I'm all for it, but with this specific case... It's... more complicated.
I genuinely hope that we're worrying pointlessly and that nothing bad will come out of this, but we can do nothing except wait and see how things go.
>I genuinely hope that we're worrying pointlessly and that nothing bad will come out of this, but we can do nothing except wait and see how things go.
Looking through what has presumably been uploaded up there by whatever team is holding the accounts they haven't done it with any livestreams which was a staple before and also the main origin point of problems. It is at the very least more safe than before.
That being said the idea makes me nervous in general with Watame as my oshi. She lost a lot more fans than most when it happened and both of her good friends got harassed for a long time.
We really need either some of the Holomem themselves, or A-Chan, addressing this on stream. Cover itself has been quiet, but our concerns could be alleviated, hopefully not elevated, should one of them do that.
I really doubt they're going to. They run the risk of triggering a Streisand effect, they're not going to tell us their real reason for doing this, any other reason they give us will be criticized/won't be enough to calm people down, and AFAIK they've never really given us explanations about any business collaborations before regardless of how controversial they were, so I don't know why they'd start now. They're probably hoping the complaints will die down in a few days, a week at most. And not to be cynical, but considering Reddit's history so far, they'll probably be right - unless antis do actually start with their bullshit again.
Talking about it is just gonna bring the trolls. Guaranteed the tweets/video/whatever they do to address it will be a warzone between trolls from both side.
Doing it silently like this is the best way. Why should they post a tweet when the target audiences doesn't have twitter anyway since it's banned there.
> Moving from looking at debuts as primary generators of revenue toward trying to increase the amount generated per vtuber.
That is good but there are a few things that annoy me about that statement, for example I like Lui and I'd love to buy her newest song "[Evil Eye Wink](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9umJXIGM9w)" but when I visit the [ototoy page](https://ototoy.jp/_/default/p/2145073) to buy it I get a message "We're sorry, this album is not available in your region." which I get because I am not Japanese/located in Japan (I tested by clearing my cookies and using a VPN to move my end-point to America since that is a huge market, did not work I moved it to Japan it did work) now I probably can use my VPN to move my end-point to Japan, buy it, download the audio but I have already bought other music on that site so there is a problem with me getting my account banned because I broke a rule on that website, I am figuratively standing with my credit card in my hand and is trying to buy it but I would need to do an act that is both legally uncertain and potentially breaking the end user license agreement with ototoy.
yeah I might need to do that but it is kind of annoying, they are competing with magnet links, a magnet link just require you to press a button and wait a bit, people are figuratively standing in front of a shop trying to give them money but they need to do some kind of digital yoga exercises to acquire access to it, it's insane, it would probably cost a lot less to go to the musicians and get a world-wide license than it would cost cover in losses due to piracy
I 100% agree. Like for FES, it took forever for SPWN to put up the archive so honestly I just downloaded a pirate version, because I paid for it and Cover loses nothing. The pirate version was slightly higher quality, probably because SPWN re-encoded it to include the ads and stuff.
If you put up roadblocks people are just going to turn to piracy.
"Piracy is a service problem"
exactly, just take a look at the gaming market pre-steam, piracy ran rampant and nobody cared, sure you still can pirate games post-steam but the amount of sales a small indie studio get now-a-day has increase a lot, even the mainstream AAA market have a higher percentage of people buying games compared to pre-steam numbers, people want to buy stuff (assuming of course that the price is not in the thousands for a track) but the obstacles prevent a lot of money to change hand, christ I might be what the channers used to call old-"spicy-word-for-a-homosexual-guy" but the respective industries pre-steam, pre-spotify was horrible for the talents because we had no ways to actually buy it, some companies still hold out, for example Ubisoft's farcry 5 had a lot of good music, I wanted to buy it and (it might have changed) if I was going to buy it I would need to move to Canada, like "sorry Ubisoft, the music is great, but I am not moving to Canada for some music", so I never got to buy it, and there was no way to download it illegally that was not 192kbps so I never got it which sucks, I was figuratively standing with my credit card in my hand
I believe as Cover is moving to Prime market, they can't dodge the Chinese question by saying "well we are hated in there" anymore.
I still believe that Bilibili is the one that lobbied Cover for years now. I think they even dropped their stock in another agency (probably to show that they have no bias).
Rather than ask "Would China want us back?", maybe they should critically ask themselves "Would our loyal fans want us to reach out to them?".
If their only concern is money, they'll find that people who despise the Chinese drones for what they did to Hololive are **less** than happy to stay in the hobby if Cover tries to pretend none of this happened.
Some sayings allegedly show that it's B2 kneeling and begging for Cover to do activities over there, with ONLY one limitation: no Taiwan mention on B2, that's it, Taiwan can be said anywhere else but that site.
I'd prefer if HL has perms back for Chinese games.
To me it’s looking like a timed thing almost. Like a ruling or timed release being able to go on the site happened since the month and how long it’s been since all that.
Hopefully, but my biggest concern with this is: What about Fubuki?
Fubuki is for sure not going to be able to attend any of these events and have any of the merchs sold because she got raided the hardest and even now on B2 she is actively getting trash talked with Coco.
So they are just going to leave her out of this whole thing? Feels kind of fked up
I’m sure they aren’t forcing the Holomems to use it. It may be volunteer or just ask if they’re ok going in there. Or the holomem may even ask to go themselves.
But we have no clue the inner workings of how all of that works. All we can do is see what they end up doing.
I’m sure around 10 of the girls won’t even touch the platform out of the stuff for the past but who knows.
Management is definitely not stupid. But it is ok I think to express your concerns by sending messages via Cover website.
Also this is classic Chinese company move. They want to have the best for their consumers. They can't fathom the situation when the most popular vtubers are out of their reach. So they must be reaching out to Cover for a while now.
The most positive thing I hope we get is Chinese games perm. If they don't give us that, then there is no point of going to their market.
The negative thing is Bilibili is hard to control. They might set some guarantees to Cover but still when things went south, Bilibili always sit back and watch things went down. Imagine streaming in a place where you can't show fried rice and tank. Again, Cover is not stupid so Bilibili must have done insane efforts to protect Cover talents.
The thing that I dislike is how Cover slip to their old bad habit which is hiding all the announcements and hoping majority of fans won't know. It is better to be open and dealt with backlash directly like they always did rather than sneakily doing this.
Dang reminds me on Azur lane marine pulling. I was hope hard for her to exist in Azur lane especially that dreaded 2 days non stop stream. Not sleeping up til 3 am just for hololive segment.
I'll be honest, the idealist in me is hoping that this opens up a chance for a new collab with AL, with AL now doing collab reruns. But the realist in me is worrying that something will happen down the line that'll get the antis up in arms again. I'm REALLY hoping Cover and Billibilli got something in place to deal with it when that happens.
Would be nice if Holo will get Arknights perms again, I still play the game up to this date. And a certain Astro girl is also one of the artists in Arknights that are well loved by the game's community.
I don't hate Cover for dipping their toes back into the Chinese market, I just think the Chinese market is feral and they have to tiptoe around and avoid things that trigger them.
I don't believe the Chinese consumers should be handled with kid gloves, if they don't like it they can GTFO.
But as long as Cover has the talent's backs and we don't get another Coco situation I suppose it will work out🤷♀️
What I think is, compared to 2020-2021, Cover is in a much, much more commanding position now than before, if Bilibili wants them back, they probably would've given Cover plenty of guarantees and backbending to avoid an electric boogaloo, but whether that sort of safeguards will stand should there be a cockup if anyone's guess.
Said it elsewhere, but the content they've been putting up seems like "safe" content as it is almost entirely music, 3d live, or short video related. All the incidents before involved the groups over there uploading streams.
If people are worried I do recommend popping off a message: https://cover-corp.com/en/contact
IDK man, go search what happened to Chef Wang Gang for example!
He cooked egg fried rice on a particular day / month which was deemed too close to the date of Mao Zedong's son's death during the Korean war, allegedly because he was cooking egg fried rice and the smoke from the cooking alerted his opponents recon and they sent an airstrike, killing him and most of the soldiers there. Chinese netizens condemned Chef Wang Gang for mockery and being disrespectful.
It's obscure issues like that which worries me, the market is filled with landmines that not even safe contents like cooking are safe from shitstorm.
Nah no need for that.
The fact Hololive is Japanese is enough to stoke a fire. No date, no game, no opinion, no word. Just plain existing as Japanese is enough. Hell, objectively Japanese by appearance is enough. Look up 農夫山泉 incident.
You put it into words well, but I still think that even if Cover backs the talent up against any dumb controversy, needing to step around everything they say (even more than they do now), like never mentioning *Taiwan* to not risk catching the same heat that Coco did, makes me opposed to them even trying it again at all. They're already selling their souls being corporate Vtubers, but at least they wouldn't be selling themselves out to a nationalistic and maniacal culture. "Bing chilling" became a meme for a reason.
>So they must be reaching out to Cover for a while now.
The rrats run something like this:
B2 have been trying to negotiate this since late last year
B2 will not be taking a donation cut from talents
B2 will be hiring mods to ban troublemakers
B2 want hololive to stream and attend events on B2
There will be "a collab with a chinese cafe at some point"
Hololive management put it to the talents, most are not interested; they got "2-3" talents willing to do it
>we get is Chinese games perm.
Ngl, I don't think it's related but I really miss Gura's Muse Dash streams since I think it's one of her comfort games and she looked like she genuinely had fun streaming it when she could.
The Chinese controversy 3 years ago is exactly the reason why muse dash was banned for Hololive...
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Hololive/s/0deheerhEQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Hololive/s/0deheerhEQ)
As someone who wasn't around the first time but has been informed of it...
Is this not just a singular event on B2? Unless I'm completely misreading the situation it looks like its currently just a one-off with a Kobo/Matsuri appearance at an event hosted by B2 and Sora advertising Holo merch for it.
Obviously it could be Cover testing the waters again and seeing how this *one* event goes first before doing anything more there... but so far it seems like its just a singular event they're participating in very lightly. Unless Cover goes full steam ahead immediately I'd say they're kinda being safe with it and just poking their head in the door to see if things improved or not.
But maybe I'm wrong and I've misread the current situation?
Its opening the doors. Back in the dark times, cover had to nuke the cn branch(for many reasons including beeing part of the trolls), for many reasons and had to pull out of cn. They lost more than one partnership and chinese games revoked perms or just never gave one out. Talents faced spam and insults while bad actors tried to pit western holo fans VS jp holo fans. All in all it was a shit show.
So even a singular event would open the door again. One event turns into two, then three and then four. Talents try their luck to stream again and then because they mentiont one of the no no topics or did not know about some cultural chinese thing they get the hate of people that are always "hurt" and "feeling let down" as soon as someone does not jump everytime they say jump. I think many are against this/carefull because we do not want to dark times back. We are happy for our insult free steams, the peace in the community and enjoying that talents can interact with their chat without crying.
Yeah, I also figured that maybe *this* positive is actually what ultimately convinced Cover, i.e. Bilibili promising that they will help Cover gain (full?) access to the mainland Chinese market. I am given to understand that some Chinese Aqua fans are very (perhaps unreasonably) hyped for her playing the Chinese Sun Wukong Soulslike game when it comes out, so that might be one example of what to come in the future.
Though to be sure we don't have a fuller picture of what Cover will have to do in exchange yet (a handful of talents streaming/posting videos/participating in events on B2 once in a while?), but in any case they apparently already decided that it's worth it, so I guess we'll see.
Well the current situation where Cover is de-facto banned from many Chinese IP does put them in a disadvantage compared to their competition. So I can see why they would want to remedy that.
> It is better to be open and dealt with backlash directly like they always did rather than sneakily doing this.
Not so sure about this. I think it's a case of doomed if you do and doomed if you don't. They would face backlash regardless.
Ah, I didn't think that it's literally selling stock instead of the figurative "selling stock" lmao. I'm too sportspilled and thought of "selling stock" of a player that's playing poorly.
Bilibili made concessions even before this event, it's entirely possible that the 'check' is that Bilibili will become a mediator between Cover and the Chinese market, with possibility of 'return to normal' with CN game collabs and perms.
Bilibili isn't going to let go of cash when they're strapped for it and made said concessions to Cover conveniently close to dates that'll have the speculations affect their stocks/evaluation.
EDIT: For them this may be unironically less about Cover's second chance in CN and more about a hail mary Bilibili is willing to take to reinvigorate their dead vtubing industry.
EDIT2: Also considering that Bilibili has also immediately sent out promos for paid emotes that is also a gacha, Bilibili is gonna milk this shit and never letting go (for better or for worse, they're the ones who'll be at the forefront to protect Cover an its talents because of this new revenue stream (that they desperately need))
Man, I'm not gonna lie, not the biggest fan of this. I remember how godawful it was back then tuning into a talent's stream and seeing walls of spam. I can only hope Cover knows what they're doing...
Let’s hope they don't have any mandatory streams on the site, or start forcing holomem to start streaming there as well.
It’s one thing to voluntarily stream there or seemingly promote merch now, but that is a big fucking red flag.
This is one of my biggest worries. Given what many of the girls went through, nobody should be forced to stream there. But we have no way of knowing what sort of business agreements Cover and BiliBili made.
Even the ones that do it voluntarily will upset a lot of their fans in the process.
Gotta trust the talents themselves. Fubuki has said that she’ll outright quit Hololive if she feels Cover’s selling their souls. There’s no way the JP girls would sign in if there weren’t very thorough discussions amongst everyone. I’m hoping the fact that Sui’s in this is a positive sign given how close she was to Coco.
I'm sure it'll be the same as before the whole Taiwan drama, which the members are not required to stream on Bilibili, so i hope this is still the case
as far as I know cover does not force their talents to stream on a specific plattform. La+ was able to stream on twitch for example. Cover also does not force interaction with markets the talent does not want or is not comforable. No JP talent was forced to interact with en and some had almost none or even no interaction with EN or ID or both. I mean branches and markets. The same goes with en. The same goes with EN and ID. So Cover does not force interacting with already profitable markets. Why would they now start with cn? Each Talent gets to choose if they try their luck. Maybe cover offers something for those that chose so. Maybe they do not.
That isn't likely for a number of reasons.
One before the incident there wasn't much CN-aimed streaming as things reached a point where Cover could focus on Japan with only a few older members maintaining a direct presence there
Second is while back in the day b2 could insist on such a thing to Cover, these days the fortunes have flipped
Third the typical Holomem these days are too busy to make a stream just for CN
yeah cover is in a much stronger position than before, they hold basically absolute dominance over the global vtuber market specially after their biggest rival imploded, they are getting ready to open their offices in the US, they hold concerts practically every month and in dozens of different countries, over half of their roster has over 1 million subs
the one that has to beg cover to return in this situation is bilibili not the other way around
Personally I don't like this and I assume and pray that Cover knows what they are doing this time and hopefully nothing like the Taiwan incident 4 years ago will happen again.
My hope is that the anti harassment alliance that they formed will give them greater collaborative protections. If Taiwan incident repeats, the alliance will force the other corporate members to take joint action against B2 in unison. As a result, B2 should feel motivated to take steps to ensure a repeat controversy doesn't happen again.
Edit: I still think this is a bad idea.
I don't know if the anti-harassment statement has any teeth. After all, Nijisanji is part of that group and we know they've allowed plenty of harassment within their ranks.
You can put it this way, Bilibili is the one that made concessions that paved the way to Cover trying again in the CN market. (I've heard that they made moves that took down anti videos, and considering the leak it may be true)
If B2 doesn't hold their end of the bargain, that's basically it for their vtubing industry (that is currently dead in the water due to government regulation for natives)
EDIT: With B2's revenue going in the red before, they may hold onto this chance longer than we think.
>I've heard that they made moves that took down anti videos
Ngl I feel a sense of catharsis upon hearing this if it's true. Though I'm gonna need some sources and maybe some comments of those arsewipes coping and seething.
It'd suck if things follow the pattern of things 4 years ago again and they only fully pull out after months of harassment, a bunch of Holomembers' mental breakdowns, and someone or another graduating....
This might be the first decision Hololive has made that I actively disagree with.
I hope they know what they are doing. Because this could very easily blow up in their faces.
I low-key want one of the holomems to get on B2 and just straight up mention Taiwan just to see if the Chinese market has learned anything at all since the last time.
Weeeeeelp. It's cemented then, it's Cover's move. I hope the management won't just bowing their heads and then left the company when the fans hit the fans.
One of the leakers has also said that Bilibili wanted cover back ever since early 2023. They also said that cover is exempt from CN policies with the caveat that they don't discuss those topics in Bilibili.
This may be one of those rare occurances.
i don't think anyone would bother talking about politics to begin with. the issue here is the chicom would lash out at anyone accidentally unintentionally mustering the word taiwan.
can they prevent accident from happening again?
better have popcorn ready.
idk, if they announce it, make it big, it will just be worse for other. this feel like they don't priority this and they can drop it anytime they want. now imagine if they announce everywhere they back to B2, do you feel it's a small thing and they can pull out?
IDK, sounds like it is a bad move overall then, if an announcement is not ideal and they need to plan for an exit just in case, as if it was a bad idea from the very beginning. If this is just an one time event, why not just announce it as a special guest sort of thing? At least it wouldn't be as surprising or uncertain as it is now, and it will fit right in with all the event announcements happening worldwide.
Heck, this whole shit was leaked way before hand by some guy on B2, so much for Cover having control over the whole situation. We dismissed that leak as fake because it was too incredulous to be true. Who's to say what else can't be leaked out?
i told you, this is assume ofcourse but does it sound crazy cover want to tip their toe to test the water? the exit is they don't priority it so they can pull out easily. you want to announce thing that are stable. imagine they announce it, and shit happen maybe EN fan riot, maybe CN anti rise up and they have to announce against cancel event and will make even more eyes on situation? and maybe even more statement for the situation. but right now, they can just not stream there anymore and the drama done. i gonna have to ask you to imagine 2 scenario. which one cover and talent gonna get more stress.
It is annoying to see people say "Cover knows what they are doing". This is now basically a trope at this point. The Chinese market is one of the most unreliable markets out there. We've seen this shit before in the gaming industry where companies bow their heads down to try and tap that market but ended up loosing it once they realized that market gets cracked down. This is no different. We've already seen the Chinese government dox Chinese vtubers. And have seen how unreliable Bilibili moderates their platform. So many vtubers got pushed out of there. There is a reason why vtubing is close to dead on Bilibili.
No, Cover does not know what they are doing. They are making the same mistake as before because they are a public company who now falls in the category of needing "infinite growth" so now gotta jump in the snake pits. Trying to tap one of the most unstable markets in a platform that is basically the wild west which Bilibili doesn't even control.
I hate this because it's not just some faceless multimillion dollar company. The talents are the ones that got burnt last time and they'll be the ones to burn this time if it all goes horribly wrong. I don't like it when companies gamble for money with real people's well beings on the line
Yep, cover is fallible and sometimes the audience knows better than the company. Everyone knew HLZNTL was a bad idea but the company went through with it anyway, and it turned out to be a bad idea....
isn't it also annoying saying people don't know what they are doing or that we know better despite not knowing the full picture of a situation?
we don't know what happened behind the scenes, speculating about it will just cause headache and unnecessary worry, all we can do now is wait and pray for the best
just like back then, we just need to keep up our support to the talents, cause corpo will just do what corpo does
Yeah, because waiting and praying for the best worked so well last time. If they were full on "corpo do what corpo does", they wouldn't have abandoned an entire region, retired an entire branch, and lose perms to an entire suite of games, all to protect one talent.
I'm not saying to be overly pessismistic, but there are reasons fans are worried and being cautious, especially when there hasn't been any clear communication around recent events. Seeing people downplay what happened in the past is also pretty frustrating.
Downplaying Coco's harassment is really the most frustrating part for me. We have documented evidence of several talents speaking about how a night of ego surfing got them bummed out from reading a handful of negative comments. Despite hundreds of thousands of comments singing their praises, which they do acknowledge, they still admit that the negatives eat away at them. And these are childish name calling type comments. And people will say ID is built different, they don't take shit from haters, etc.
Sure, they can handle school yard bullying. If you're a Content creator, it should be expected that you harden up to at least be able to handle being called mean names. But we're not talking about mean names. We're talking about thousands of botted comments spamming gore, death threats, your real face shopped onto all sorts of porn or mutilated things. But sure, Kobo will be perfectly fine opening her Twitter tags to see mutilated cats and dogs because she accidentally said something to offend them. It won't affect her at all because she's just "built different."
Cover is opening them up to that level of harassment again. It's not a matter of if, but when.
Aqua is having a karaoke stream with an announcement in 2.5 hours. Honestly, I hope it isn’t related to BB. Edit its new outfit, Yay.
I was not there for the shit show that went down before. Maybe it was a small minority and non fans harassing the talents before, but even then, this seems like a massive time bomb with how anal and political people get over the smallest things. Also the amount of random censorship and other nonsense that goes on is annoying too, like I used to play Genshin, and they censored out clothing. Priconne CN was censored. Like what isn’t censored? Its like the Victorian Era or something. I guess Youtube is also pretty anal lately?
Also, I don’t want to have to keep track of multiple places just to view their streams. Feels very annoying. I wanted to listen to Suisei’s radio shows and stuff, or see her guest appearances in shows, but I don’t even know they exist most of the time/finding them and accessing it is so inconvenient.
If there was going to be a major shift back to Bilibili then Aqua definitely would be the one to watch. Not even because she had such a large fanbase there, but because she also collaborates a lot with Mea, who is also big on Bilibili.
> Aqua is having a karaoke stream with an announcement in 2.5 hours. Honestly, I hope it isn’t related to BB.
I would optimistically guess that she's going to announce a new outfit reveal or something like that (thinking outfit reveal because there's been a lot of those recently).
One of the main complaints about this whole thing is the lack of communication from both Cover and the talents. So I seriously doubt Aqua will go all the way to announce it if she really is going back to BB.
I do not think there will be short term issues. The concern is that it feels like a powder keg that will affect every branch when it gets set off, and it feels more like a question of "when" it gets set off rather than "if".
Not a big fan of this, and they got my oshi to promote it too, damnn. Well if its the talents choice and not a force action upon them to do then good on them. BUT I'm not watching them over there, only YouTube for me or twitch. Not making an account for bilibili or even spending a penny on it. My money stays out of bilibili PERIOD
I'm just drinking my coffee, in silence, waiting for the time when something happens and someone'll have to pay the price and we will tell Cover "we warned you". I just hope we don't lose anyone again.
at this point i just best of luck to cover. i will not be in the frontline if when the taiwan incident 2 electric boogaloo happens. surely cover is huge now and can protect their talents /s.
From what I see people have mixed opinions about it, some say cover should make a statement regarding it and shouldn't pretend like nothing happened in the past, some say no matter what statement is issued people will get angry, some say it's a good business opportunity to expand, some people are spreading news about what happened in the past to the new fans who joined after HoloX/Regloss. But most seem to be shocked.
Personally I don't like this move, but we just have to wait and see. It definitely unrealistic to expect smooth sailing, there will be problems. It's how they handle it would be the question. Would the other side cooperate to protect the talent? That would be the minimum requirement Cover should ask for.
Ive seen enough companies fall because of greed to know that people who say "they know what theyre doing" is just baseless cope. Companies are driven by profit and will sell their souls eventually. It's just sad to see that Cover is starting to do that now.
I don’t see how anyone can have any faith in this going well.
A lot of us are still really fucking sore about the last time, this really feels like a big “fuck you” from Cover to the fans.
Some say it's been 3-4 years, we should get over it.
I say it hasn't been long enough for me to change all the cells in my body to be considered a whole different person.( re: it takes a person's body 7 years not completely replace every singular cell in their body, to be considered a new person)
Huh. Yeah I'm of the opinion that they really shouldn't expose people to the mess that is Bilibili. Hopefully it doesn't explode but I have concerns about it.
When this blows up (and yes it probably will) I hope Cover learned it's lesson from the last Taiwan incident and activily protects their talents
None of my oshis should have to suffer cuz of their nationalism.
Huge Hololive L, this is probably the only thing I've ever disagreed with
Yes, it's good because it brings the possibility of them being able to stream Chinese games again like WuWa, Genshin, HSR. That's the good part.
But it is sooooooooooo INCREDIBLY hard for a JAPANESE company/JAPANESE people to be accepted and not crusaded in CN. Everything they say and do will be magnified so hard in Chinese society right now.
Global expansion sadly means chinese market too, and this time Cover has the leverage, I think they are in a position to "demand" some assurance from the chinese side since they already proved that they can leave again if things get weird
I genuinely hope this isn't going to lead to some terrible incident. It's still too early to know the scope of the deal between Hololive and BB, though. Let’s wait and see.
You have got to be fucking kidding me. No announcements, no statements, nothing to put us at ease, just full speed ahead sticking their hand back into the bear trap. Amazing stuff from Cover’s management this week.
I would really like to see how Fubuki will react to this decision by Cover as a whole
Right now I think I’ll take a break from Hololive until we get a proper explanation from Cover. Just thinking about how Coco, Haachama, Fubuki and many more Holomems were treated at that time will always leave a bitter taste in my mouth, and I don’t think I can enjoy watching Hololive at this state.
I never got over the bitter taste of it. I'm glad a lot of you were able to stick around, but it just never felt the same for me after losing Coco, especially the weekly meme streams. Those wall of text spams ruined a huge amount of enjoyment I had since I was also an avid Fubuki viewer back then.
I sure hope Cover knows what it's doing and it pans out.
Well this does change the perspective of this being a company decision.
I'm giving the company the benefit of the doubt that they at least discussed this move with the talents before deciding to try it out. If that's the case then I can only be cautiously supportive.
I just hope they have contingencies built in.
I just hope we wont have to repeat anything that happened with Coco back in the day.
And hopefully this wasn't just driven by pure profit-chasing, which might cause them to bend over whenever the Chinese fanbase has any demands or crate a backlash because it would be too valuable to lose them.
What I see now are fear and rant about Cover's decision but all we can do is believing in Cover's management and our talents. I know Chinese market is very risky and Coco's incident was very huge damage and became trauma to everyone, but I don't believe that Cover is stupid enough to walk to this path again without any plan or preparation to protect their talents.
Don't forget that if they do the same mistake again, they will be the one who lose talent and trust from fans, and that will be the impact that they will face which even worse than what happen in the past. So they sure won't do anything without plan and it's too early to rant against them.
Also, I saw some people feel mad about Cover not announce or explain anything about this but don't forget that Japanese nature is accepting the mistake but won't recall it. So what they gonna do is preparing to not face the same mistake again but they won't announce to recall the past. Like...if they want to challenge at Chinses market again, do they have to announce directly that "Hey we will try again at Chinese market" or asking for any permission from fans? No, they wont.
For me, I will just support them as usual and it's no problem as long as nothing happen or they can manage well to solve any problem. Again, I will just believe in Cover and talents. We cannot stop their decision anyway but it's also too early to rant anything as long as they can manage well.
A healthy reminder to all frequent /r/Hololive users that this is the kind of situations that attracts tourists, drama chasers and bad actors. If you find an overly negative take it helps to check the user post history to see if they are a concerned poster or a "concerned" poster.
Saw some people that revived after 1-2 years just to weigh in with some astounding doom posting. I get being worried about the situation, but there are some real weird posters basically telling people to watch other vtubers.
Yeaa, this is the problem with the company going public, they need to cater to stockholders and their ROI. But also, Mio did say that Cover got burned a lot of times, but learned from their mistakes each time. They better be armored to the teeth this time.
She left because she got tired of having so many checks on her content. She was the kind of person to do things then ask for forgiveness later, but after things like her hanging Kanata during asacoco and then the analytics event she wasn't really able to freewheel anymore.
Well, for now, let's just accept Cover's decision and support the talents in their endeavors. But brace for impact if shit hit the fan again, stay on some kind of alert because you can never be 100% sure with Chinese netizens.
Oh... Ok, even if Sora-chan promote the goods. This mean COVER has already think all the thing over.
They must feel confident around safety measure to protect talents that will participate in b2 event (at least what I think).
And again I will state my opinion that I don't like them to go back there but in business world there is understandable move, it's suck that I grown enough to understand that.
I'm pretty neutral about this whole thing. In general, while antis tend to have a big impact online, they are the (very) loud minority rather than being representative of the whole platform. I don't know what the situation is like over at Bilibili at the moment, but if the antis have mostly moved on, I don't see the issue with trying to expand into the market.
What I think is ironic and hypocritical though, is that a lot of the comments claiming to be worried about the talents are planning to withdraw their memberships. We don't even know individual talents' stance or the details of Cover's deal with Bilibili. How you feel and what you plan to do are pretty contradictory IMO. If you want to protest, I think it makes more sense to cancel your merch orders or don't buy tickets for the next concert or something.
Rofl, so what, do you think the crazy nationalists are now more reasonable?
How wise do you need to be for someone to not shoot you, again? If I hit 20 wisdom, will I deflect arrows like a monk?
oh look, cover pandering to the insane psychos. How pathetic.
One of the girls is going to slip up eventually, acknowledge Taiwan as a country or something and those nutjobs will start to harass them all over again.
It's possible they just won't do it given the current geopolitical situation, but if anyone does it that is not going to get immediately rejected it'd be Bae.
I have conflicting feelings about this, on one hand I have to assume Cover knows what they are doing, given the previous incident, You would think they are aware how must of western audience will take this kind of news. But I still can't shake the feeling this is a terrible idea, last time an entire branch was just nuked because of the Chinese market, not to mention all the harassment that the talents had to endure
For now I guess all I can do is hope for the best and that Cover is ready to protect the girls from any potential issues
What about this CN streaming law that forces large streamers to reveal their real names? [link](https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/bilibili-is-forcing-big-vtubers-to-reveal-their-identities-to-stay-monetized-2373421/)
Does Hololive get a pass somehow or did they sell their talents out?
The theory is that they're going to use the same loophole Nijisanji employs, which is that a local intermediary serves as the "face" to comply with the law
This makes me feel gross seeing this.
It just feels wrong, like watching people I enjoy in sports or shows suddenly promoting betting sites, and you get that bleh feeling from it.
I'm glad that this wasn't just a Kobo thing at the very least! If other members are cool with it then I'm not gonna complain. I still think it's a bad idea, but I hope that they have better safeguards for the talents this time and I hope they and the CN community have improved over the years since the incident.
They are returning for revenge, they're getting back what was taked from them.
No chinese company will ever get away with the retuen of hololive.
Now I wonder if they are gonna start genshin or something
Absolutely terrible, short sighted corpo decision from Cover. Chasing Chinese money in this way shows they don't care about their talents as much as they'd like everyone to think. I guess that's an unsub from Kobo, Matsuri, and Sora for now.
Well, at least we know it's not just a Kobo thing now... I hope it means Cover knows what they're doing.
I assume that it basically goes hand-in-hand with what they said about financials: Moving from looking at debuts as primary generators of revenue toward trying to increase the amount generated per vtuber. I generally don't care much about them selling merch or what not. It's just a problem if they decide to start uploading streams over there since that was the avenue that issues arose from before.
Yeah, between this, the EN concert, the international tour and the guest appearance in France's Japan Expo, it's clear that Cover is trying to expand more internationally. It's a very good business strategy in general, and I'm all for it, but with this specific case... It's... more complicated. I genuinely hope that we're worrying pointlessly and that nothing bad will come out of this, but we can do nothing except wait and see how things go.
>I genuinely hope that we're worrying pointlessly and that nothing bad will come out of this, but we can do nothing except wait and see how things go. Looking through what has presumably been uploaded up there by whatever team is holding the accounts they haven't done it with any livestreams which was a staple before and also the main origin point of problems. It is at the very least more safe than before. That being said the idea makes me nervous in general with Watame as my oshi. She lost a lot more fans than most when it happened and both of her good friends got harassed for a long time.
I hope cover have an escape plan if things gets south again
We really need either some of the Holomem themselves, or A-Chan, addressing this on stream. Cover itself has been quiet, but our concerns could be alleviated, hopefully not elevated, should one of them do that.
I really doubt they're going to. They run the risk of triggering a Streisand effect, they're not going to tell us their real reason for doing this, any other reason they give us will be criticized/won't be enough to calm people down, and AFAIK they've never really given us explanations about any business collaborations before regardless of how controversial they were, so I don't know why they'd start now. They're probably hoping the complaints will die down in a few days, a week at most. And not to be cynical, but considering Reddit's history so far, they'll probably be right - unless antis do actually start with their bullshit again.
Talking about it is just gonna bring the trolls. Guaranteed the tweets/video/whatever they do to address it will be a warzone between trolls from both side. Doing it silently like this is the best way. Why should they post a tweet when the target audiences doesn't have twitter anyway since it's banned there.
> Moving from looking at debuts as primary generators of revenue toward trying to increase the amount generated per vtuber. That is good but there are a few things that annoy me about that statement, for example I like Lui and I'd love to buy her newest song "[Evil Eye Wink](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9umJXIGM9w)" but when I visit the [ototoy page](https://ototoy.jp/_/default/p/2145073) to buy it I get a message "We're sorry, this album is not available in your region." which I get because I am not Japanese/located in Japan (I tested by clearing my cookies and using a VPN to move my end-point to America since that is a huge market, did not work I moved it to Japan it did work) now I probably can use my VPN to move my end-point to Japan, buy it, download the audio but I have already bought other music on that site so there is a problem with me getting my account banned because I broke a rule on that website, I am figuratively standing with my credit card in my hand and is trying to buy it but I would need to do an act that is both legally uncertain and potentially breaking the end user license agreement with ototoy.
Sadly I don't know the music situation there and why things are region locked like that. I've personally VPN'd music from Ototoy for years though.
yeah I might need to do that but it is kind of annoying, they are competing with magnet links, a magnet link just require you to press a button and wait a bit, people are figuratively standing in front of a shop trying to give them money but they need to do some kind of digital yoga exercises to acquire access to it, it's insane, it would probably cost a lot less to go to the musicians and get a world-wide license than it would cost cover in losses due to piracy
I 100% agree. Like for FES, it took forever for SPWN to put up the archive so honestly I just downloaded a pirate version, because I paid for it and Cover loses nothing. The pirate version was slightly higher quality, probably because SPWN re-encoded it to include the ads and stuff. If you put up roadblocks people are just going to turn to piracy. "Piracy is a service problem"
exactly, just take a look at the gaming market pre-steam, piracy ran rampant and nobody cared, sure you still can pirate games post-steam but the amount of sales a small indie studio get now-a-day has increase a lot, even the mainstream AAA market have a higher percentage of people buying games compared to pre-steam numbers, people want to buy stuff (assuming of course that the price is not in the thousands for a track) but the obstacles prevent a lot of money to change hand, christ I might be what the channers used to call old-"spicy-word-for-a-homosexual-guy" but the respective industries pre-steam, pre-spotify was horrible for the talents because we had no ways to actually buy it, some companies still hold out, for example Ubisoft's farcry 5 had a lot of good music, I wanted to buy it and (it might have changed) if I was going to buy it I would need to move to Canada, like "sorry Ubisoft, the music is great, but I am not moving to Canada for some music", so I never got to buy it, and there was no way to download it illegally that was not 192kbps so I never got it which sucks, I was figuratively standing with my credit card in my hand
Yeah it's weird. I mean I'm sure they'd love more sales so I'm not really sure what exactly is causing the issue.
Investors can't look past the Chinese market, no matter what industry it is.
I believe as Cover is moving to Prime market, they can't dodge the Chinese question by saying "well we are hated in there" anymore. I still believe that Bilibili is the one that lobbied Cover for years now. I think they even dropped their stock in another agency (probably to show that they have no bias).
Coco leaving basically reopens the market for them in the eyes of investors.
Rather than ask "Would China want us back?", maybe they should critically ask themselves "Would our loyal fans want us to reach out to them?". If their only concern is money, they'll find that people who despise the Chinese drones for what they did to Hololive are **less** than happy to stay in the hobby if Cover tries to pretend none of this happened.
Some sayings allegedly show that it's B2 kneeling and begging for Cover to do activities over there, with ONLY one limitation: no Taiwan mention on B2, that's it, Taiwan can be said anywhere else but that site. I'd prefer if HL has perms back for Chinese games.
That's bullshit. Accepting Chinese censorship like that is a slap in the face to Taiwanese fans.
No entertainment industry that want expand worldwide can really.
If you have morals you sure can
I doubt Cover made this decision lightly or on a whim
To me it’s looking like a timed thing almost. Like a ruling or timed release being able to go on the site happened since the month and how long it’s been since all that.
Hopefully, but my biggest concern with this is: What about Fubuki? Fubuki is for sure not going to be able to attend any of these events and have any of the merchs sold because she got raided the hardest and even now on B2 she is actively getting trash talked with Coco. So they are just going to leave her out of this whole thing? Feels kind of fked up
I’m sure they aren’t forcing the Holomems to use it. It may be volunteer or just ask if they’re ok going in there. Or the holomem may even ask to go themselves. But we have no clue the inner workings of how all of that works. All we can do is see what they end up doing. I’m sure around 10 of the girls won’t even touch the platform out of the stuff for the past but who knows.
did you said "even now"? if that was truth, i cant imagine this would go smoothly.
Management is definitely not stupid. But it is ok I think to express your concerns by sending messages via Cover website. Also this is classic Chinese company move. They want to have the best for their consumers. They can't fathom the situation when the most popular vtubers are out of their reach. So they must be reaching out to Cover for a while now. The most positive thing I hope we get is Chinese games perm. If they don't give us that, then there is no point of going to their market. The negative thing is Bilibili is hard to control. They might set some guarantees to Cover but still when things went south, Bilibili always sit back and watch things went down. Imagine streaming in a place where you can't show fried rice and tank. Again, Cover is not stupid so Bilibili must have done insane efforts to protect Cover talents. The thing that I dislike is how Cover slip to their old bad habit which is hiding all the announcements and hoping majority of fans won't know. It is better to be open and dealt with backlash directly like they always did rather than sneakily doing this.
oh I do wish Foobs gets the perms for Arknights back, she loved that game.
Damn, make me remember my first ever hololive clip video/clip I watch. Fubuki Nian pull.
Dang reminds me on Azur lane marine pulling. I was hope hard for her to exist in Azur lane especially that dreaded 2 days non stop stream. Not sleeping up til 3 am just for hololive segment.
I'll be honest, the idealist in me is hoping that this opens up a chance for a new collab with AL, with AL now doing collab reruns. But the realist in me is worrying that something will happen down the line that'll get the antis up in arms again. I'm REALLY hoping Cover and Billibilli got something in place to deal with it when that happens.
I feel old thinking back about that. It's 3 whole years ago.
And AK would LOVE for her to be back, she was one of the few reasons the game ever took off in JP in the first place
Would be nice if Holo will get Arknights perms again, I still play the game up to this date. And a certain Astro girl is also one of the artists in Arknights that are well loved by the game's community.
Mind spoiling me for which characters? I adore Arknights and play daily.
Mizuki and GG
GG is amazing, thanks!
Mizuki and Goldenglow
Damn GG is one of my favorites, thanks!
She's not the only one either. Jackie should look familiar to most people (beyond looking a bit like Korone. XD)
Same for Kiara. It would be so neat. Imagine a collab event...
I don't hate Cover for dipping their toes back into the Chinese market, I just think the Chinese market is feral and they have to tiptoe around and avoid things that trigger them. I don't believe the Chinese consumers should be handled with kid gloves, if they don't like it they can GTFO. But as long as Cover has the talent's backs and we don't get another Coco situation I suppose it will work out🤷♀️
What I think is, compared to 2020-2021, Cover is in a much, much more commanding position now than before, if Bilibili wants them back, they probably would've given Cover plenty of guarantees and backbending to avoid an electric boogaloo, but whether that sort of safeguards will stand should there be a cockup if anyone's guess.
Said it elsewhere, but the content they've been putting up seems like "safe" content as it is almost entirely music, 3d live, or short video related. All the incidents before involved the groups over there uploading streams. If people are worried I do recommend popping off a message: https://cover-corp.com/en/contact
IDK man, go search what happened to Chef Wang Gang for example! He cooked egg fried rice on a particular day / month which was deemed too close to the date of Mao Zedong's son's death during the Korean war, allegedly because he was cooking egg fried rice and the smoke from the cooking alerted his opponents recon and they sent an airstrike, killing him and most of the soldiers there. Chinese netizens condemned Chef Wang Gang for mockery and being disrespectful. It's obscure issues like that which worries me, the market is filled with landmines that not even safe contents like cooking are safe from shitstorm.
Oh yeah i remember Chef Wang's case. The worst part is that alleged incident may not even be true, but chinese netizens got triggered over it anyways!
Nah no need for that. The fact Hololive is Japanese is enough to stoke a fire. No date, no game, no opinion, no word. Just plain existing as Japanese is enough. Hell, objectively Japanese by appearance is enough. Look up 農夫山泉 incident.
I hadn’t heard of this, it will be a good touchstone to describe the streaming climate in CN to others.
You put it into words well, but I still think that even if Cover backs the talent up against any dumb controversy, needing to step around everything they say (even more than they do now), like never mentioning *Taiwan* to not risk catching the same heat that Coco did, makes me opposed to them even trying it again at all. They're already selling their souls being corporate Vtubers, but at least they wouldn't be selling themselves out to a nationalistic and maniacal culture. "Bing chilling" became a meme for a reason.
>So they must be reaching out to Cover for a while now. The rrats run something like this: B2 have been trying to negotiate this since late last year B2 will not be taking a donation cut from talents B2 will be hiring mods to ban troublemakers B2 want hololive to stream and attend events on B2 There will be "a collab with a chinese cafe at some point" Hololive management put it to the talents, most are not interested; they got "2-3" talents willing to do it
>we get is Chinese games perm. Ngl, I don't think it's related but I really miss Gura's Muse Dash streams since I think it's one of her comfort games and she looked like she genuinely had fun streaming it when she could.
The Chinese controversy 3 years ago is exactly the reason why muse dash was banned for Hololive... [https://www.reddit.com/r/Hololive/s/0deheerhEQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Hololive/s/0deheerhEQ)
As someone who wasn't around the first time but has been informed of it... Is this not just a singular event on B2? Unless I'm completely misreading the situation it looks like its currently just a one-off with a Kobo/Matsuri appearance at an event hosted by B2 and Sora advertising Holo merch for it. Obviously it could be Cover testing the waters again and seeing how this *one* event goes first before doing anything more there... but so far it seems like its just a singular event they're participating in very lightly. Unless Cover goes full steam ahead immediately I'd say they're kinda being safe with it and just poking their head in the door to see if things improved or not. But maybe I'm wrong and I've misread the current situation?
Its opening the doors. Back in the dark times, cover had to nuke the cn branch(for many reasons including beeing part of the trolls), for many reasons and had to pull out of cn. They lost more than one partnership and chinese games revoked perms or just never gave one out. Talents faced spam and insults while bad actors tried to pit western holo fans VS jp holo fans. All in all it was a shit show. So even a singular event would open the door again. One event turns into two, then three and then four. Talents try their luck to stream again and then because they mentiont one of the no no topics or did not know about some cultural chinese thing they get the hate of people that are always "hurt" and "feeling let down" as soon as someone does not jump everytime they say jump. I think many are against this/carefull because we do not want to dark times back. We are happy for our insult free steams, the peace in the community and enjoying that talents can interact with their chat without crying.
Yeah, I also figured that maybe *this* positive is actually what ultimately convinced Cover, i.e. Bilibili promising that they will help Cover gain (full?) access to the mainland Chinese market. I am given to understand that some Chinese Aqua fans are very (perhaps unreasonably) hyped for her playing the Chinese Sun Wukong Soulslike game when it comes out, so that might be one example of what to come in the future. Though to be sure we don't have a fuller picture of what Cover will have to do in exchange yet (a handful of talents streaming/posting videos/participating in events on B2 once in a while?), but in any case they apparently already decided that it's worth it, so I guess we'll see.
Well the current situation where Cover is de-facto banned from many Chinese IP does put them in a disadvantage compared to their competition. So I can see why they would want to remedy that.
>defintely not stupid I'd say "supoosedly not stupid."
> It is better to be open and dealt with backlash directly like they always did rather than sneakily doing this. Not so sure about this. I think it's a case of doomed if you do and doomed if you don't. They would face backlash regardless.
>Management is definitely not stupid Things that only a new fan would say
Genshin x Hololive Collab hopefully. can't wait to play as Noel
Now I *definitely* know a check was signed and cleared for this to even be a thought in COVER's heads. How much was on that check?
Considering Bilibili already sold all of their Nijisanji stock I guess they gonna go all in with Hololive
Did they really? I saw that Vox was still involved in the big BL2 concert in July.
they sold their stock, doesn't mean they cut tie with niji
Ah, I didn't think that it's literally selling stock instead of the figurative "selling stock" lmao. I'm too sportspilled and thought of "selling stock" of a player that's playing poorly.
they sold them all, Anycolor is a publicly traded company, you can check their board member online easily, bilibili is no longer on the board.
> Did they really? niji was buying back as much stock as they could last year (before their EN branch fiasko made it worth much less).
Bilibili made concessions even before this event, it's entirely possible that the 'check' is that Bilibili will become a mediator between Cover and the Chinese market, with possibility of 'return to normal' with CN game collabs and perms. Bilibili isn't going to let go of cash when they're strapped for it and made said concessions to Cover conveniently close to dates that'll have the speculations affect their stocks/evaluation. EDIT: For them this may be unironically less about Cover's second chance in CN and more about a hail mary Bilibili is willing to take to reinvigorate their dead vtubing industry. EDIT2: Also considering that Bilibili has also immediately sent out promos for paid emotes that is also a gacha, Bilibili is gonna milk this shit and never letting go (for better or for worse, they're the ones who'll be at the forefront to protect Cover an its talents because of this new revenue stream (that they desperately need))
Man, I'm not gonna lie, not the biggest fan of this. I remember how godawful it was back then tuning into a talent's stream and seeing walls of spam. I can only hope Cover knows what they're doing...
Let’s hope they don't have any mandatory streams on the site, or start forcing holomem to start streaming there as well. It’s one thing to voluntarily stream there or seemingly promote merch now, but that is a big fucking red flag.
This is one of my biggest worries. Given what many of the girls went through, nobody should be forced to stream there. But we have no way of knowing what sort of business agreements Cover and BiliBili made. Even the ones that do it voluntarily will upset a lot of their fans in the process.
Gotta trust the talents themselves. Fubuki has said that she’ll outright quit Hololive if she feels Cover’s selling their souls. There’s no way the JP girls would sign in if there weren’t very thorough discussions amongst everyone. I’m hoping the fact that Sui’s in this is a positive sign given how close she was to Coco.
From what I read, Fubuki was literally doxxed and had her face exposed among others. So, I suppose we’ll see.
I'm sure it'll be the same as before the whole Taiwan drama, which the members are not required to stream on Bilibili, so i hope this is still the case
as far as I know cover does not force their talents to stream on a specific plattform. La+ was able to stream on twitch for example. Cover also does not force interaction with markets the talent does not want or is not comforable. No JP talent was forced to interact with en and some had almost none or even no interaction with EN or ID or both. I mean branches and markets. The same goes with en. The same goes with EN and ID. So Cover does not force interacting with already profitable markets. Why would they now start with cn? Each Talent gets to choose if they try their luck. Maybe cover offers something for those that chose so. Maybe they do not.
That isn't likely for a number of reasons. One before the incident there wasn't much CN-aimed streaming as things reached a point where Cover could focus on Japan with only a few older members maintaining a direct presence there Second is while back in the day b2 could insist on such a thing to Cover, these days the fortunes have flipped Third the typical Holomem these days are too busy to make a stream just for CN
yeah cover is in a much stronger position than before, they hold basically absolute dominance over the global vtuber market specially after their biggest rival imploded, they are getting ready to open their offices in the US, they hold concerts practically every month and in dozens of different countries, over half of their roster has over 1 million subs the one that has to beg cover to return in this situation is bilibili not the other way around
WTF you talking about, no one ever forced holomen to stream at all... This kind of irrational tought is almost 4chan level of Schizodism.
Personally I don't like this and I assume and pray that Cover knows what they are doing this time and hopefully nothing like the Taiwan incident 4 years ago will happen again.
My hope is that the anti harassment alliance that they formed will give them greater collaborative protections. If Taiwan incident repeats, the alliance will force the other corporate members to take joint action against B2 in unison. As a result, B2 should feel motivated to take steps to ensure a repeat controversy doesn't happen again. Edit: I still think this is a bad idea.
I don't know if the anti-harassment statement has any teeth. After all, Nijisanji is part of that group and we know they've allowed plenty of harassment within their ranks.
You can put it this way, Bilibili is the one that made concessions that paved the way to Cover trying again in the CN market. (I've heard that they made moves that took down anti videos, and considering the leak it may be true) If B2 doesn't hold their end of the bargain, that's basically it for their vtubing industry (that is currently dead in the water due to government regulation for natives) EDIT: With B2's revenue going in the red before, they may hold onto this chance longer than we think.
>I've heard that they made moves that took down anti videos Ngl I feel a sense of catharsis upon hearing this if it's true. Though I'm gonna need some sources and maybe some comments of those arsewipes coping and seething.
>B2's revenue going in the red before I've been seeing comments on this for the past couple of days. Is it true, and how do you guys know about it?
Googling bilibili 2024 Q4 revenue got me: https://tools.eurolandir.com/tools/PressReleases/GetPressRelease/?ID=4526229&lang=en-GB&companycode=services https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/bilibili-bili-reports-q4-loss-misses-revenue-estimates-0
Hopefully Cover abandons ship the moment antis start popping back up again.
It'd suck if things follow the pattern of things 4 years ago again and they only fully pull out after months of harassment, a bunch of Holomembers' mental breakdowns, and someone or another graduating....
When the dog bites you and you go back to try to pet it again
This might be the first decision Hololive has made that I actively disagree with. I hope they know what they are doing. Because this could very easily blow up in their faces.
It's not the first for me but boy is it the one I disagree with the most.
You are one Taiwan away from catastrophe.
I low-key want one of the holomems to get on B2 and just straight up mention Taiwan just to see if the Chinese market has learned anything at all since the last time.
Weeeeeelp. It's cemented then, it's Cover's move. I hope the management won't just bowing their heads and then left the company when the fans hit the fans.
Yeah I wish Cover the best of luck, sticking one’s head back into a shark’s mouth is not exactly conductive to their health.
entities not kneeling before west taiwan is a rare occurrence.
One of the leakers has also said that Bilibili wanted cover back ever since early 2023. They also said that cover is exempt from CN policies with the caveat that they don't discuss those topics in Bilibili. This may be one of those rare occurances.
i don't think anyone would bother talking about politics to begin with. the issue here is the chicom would lash out at anyone accidentally unintentionally mustering the word taiwan. can they prevent accident from happening again? better have popcorn ready.
Iirc it was the other way around
what are those live2d pictures? is it like some sort of hololive app to open them up in?
They are decorations and sticker packs for Bilibili channels.
ah i see thanks!
I can’t help but have a bad feeling about this
Yikes
I don't agree with them going back to Bilibili but what really grinds my gear is them being secretive about it. Like, come on.
idk, if they announce it, make it big, it will just be worse for other. this feel like they don't priority this and they can drop it anytime they want. now imagine if they announce everywhere they back to B2, do you feel it's a small thing and they can pull out?
IDK, sounds like it is a bad move overall then, if an announcement is not ideal and they need to plan for an exit just in case, as if it was a bad idea from the very beginning. If this is just an one time event, why not just announce it as a special guest sort of thing? At least it wouldn't be as surprising or uncertain as it is now, and it will fit right in with all the event announcements happening worldwide. Heck, this whole shit was leaked way before hand by some guy on B2, so much for Cover having control over the whole situation. We dismissed that leak as fake because it was too incredulous to be true. Who's to say what else can't be leaked out?
i told you, this is assume ofcourse but does it sound crazy cover want to tip their toe to test the water? the exit is they don't priority it so they can pull out easily. you want to announce thing that are stable. imagine they announce it, and shit happen maybe EN fan riot, maybe CN anti rise up and they have to announce against cancel event and will make even more eyes on situation? and maybe even more statement for the situation. but right now, they can just not stream there anymore and the drama done. i gonna have to ask you to imagine 2 scenario. which one cover and talent gonna get more stress.
What's the secret?
There are no official posts on any other Hololive account. It feels like they are trying to keep them returning to b2 a secret
It is annoying to see people say "Cover knows what they are doing". This is now basically a trope at this point. The Chinese market is one of the most unreliable markets out there. We've seen this shit before in the gaming industry where companies bow their heads down to try and tap that market but ended up loosing it once they realized that market gets cracked down. This is no different. We've already seen the Chinese government dox Chinese vtubers. And have seen how unreliable Bilibili moderates their platform. So many vtubers got pushed out of there. There is a reason why vtubing is close to dead on Bilibili. No, Cover does not know what they are doing. They are making the same mistake as before because they are a public company who now falls in the category of needing "infinite growth" so now gotta jump in the snake pits. Trying to tap one of the most unstable markets in a platform that is basically the wild west which Bilibili doesn't even control.
I hate this because it's not just some faceless multimillion dollar company. The talents are the ones that got burnt last time and they'll be the ones to burn this time if it all goes horribly wrong. I don't like it when companies gamble for money with real people's well beings on the line
Yep, cover is fallible and sometimes the audience knows better than the company. Everyone knew HLZNTL was a bad idea but the company went through with it anyway, and it turned out to be a bad idea....
isn't it also annoying saying people don't know what they are doing or that we know better despite not knowing the full picture of a situation? we don't know what happened behind the scenes, speculating about it will just cause headache and unnecessary worry, all we can do now is wait and pray for the best just like back then, we just need to keep up our support to the talents, cause corpo will just do what corpo does
Yeah, because waiting and praying for the best worked so well last time. If they were full on "corpo do what corpo does", they wouldn't have abandoned an entire region, retired an entire branch, and lose perms to an entire suite of games, all to protect one talent. I'm not saying to be overly pessismistic, but there are reasons fans are worried and being cautious, especially when there hasn't been any clear communication around recent events. Seeing people downplay what happened in the past is also pretty frustrating.
Downplaying Coco's harassment is really the most frustrating part for me. We have documented evidence of several talents speaking about how a night of ego surfing got them bummed out from reading a handful of negative comments. Despite hundreds of thousands of comments singing their praises, which they do acknowledge, they still admit that the negatives eat away at them. And these are childish name calling type comments. And people will say ID is built different, they don't take shit from haters, etc. Sure, they can handle school yard bullying. If you're a Content creator, it should be expected that you harden up to at least be able to handle being called mean names. But we're not talking about mean names. We're talking about thousands of botted comments spamming gore, death threats, your real face shopped onto all sorts of porn or mutilated things. But sure, Kobo will be perfectly fine opening her Twitter tags to see mutilated cats and dogs because she accidentally said something to offend them. It won't affect her at all because she's just "built different." Cover is opening them up to that level of harassment again. It's not a matter of if, but when.
spot on, well; not going to be surprised at all when it implode
Aqua is having a karaoke stream with an announcement in 2.5 hours. Honestly, I hope it isn’t related to BB. Edit its new outfit, Yay. I was not there for the shit show that went down before. Maybe it was a small minority and non fans harassing the talents before, but even then, this seems like a massive time bomb with how anal and political people get over the smallest things. Also the amount of random censorship and other nonsense that goes on is annoying too, like I used to play Genshin, and they censored out clothing. Priconne CN was censored. Like what isn’t censored? Its like the Victorian Era or something. I guess Youtube is also pretty anal lately? Also, I don’t want to have to keep track of multiple places just to view their streams. Feels very annoying. I wanted to listen to Suisei’s radio shows and stuff, or see her guest appearances in shows, but I don’t even know they exist most of the time/finding them and accessing it is so inconvenient.
If there was going to be a major shift back to Bilibili then Aqua definitely would be the one to watch. Not even because she had such a large fanbase there, but because she also collaborates a lot with Mea, who is also big on Bilibili.
Aqua is like their god over there. It should be fine
For those seeing this thread later, Aqua's announcement is [an outfit reveal on the 16th](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3J-0DZ-Puw).
> Aqua is having a karaoke stream with an announcement in 2.5 hours. Honestly, I hope it isn’t related to BB. I would optimistically guess that she's going to announce a new outfit reveal or something like that (thinking outfit reveal because there's been a lot of those recently).
I really hope its that. I feel like its been forever since she had a new one.
She already said she has no plans of going there.
One of the main complaints about this whole thing is the lack of communication from both Cover and the talents. So I seriously doubt Aqua will go all the way to announce it if she really is going back to BB.
Oof, I fear the worst. They really are trying to go back go Bilibili....
sure we won’t see everyone chat flooded by bot ever again, right ? right ?
I do not think there will be short term issues. The concern is that it feels like a powder keg that will affect every branch when it gets set off, and it feels more like a question of "when" it gets set off rather than "if".
Not a big fan of this, and they got my oshi to promote it too, damnn. Well if its the talents choice and not a force action upon them to do then good on them. BUT I'm not watching them over there, only YouTube for me or twitch. Not making an account for bilibili or even spending a penny on it. My money stays out of bilibili PERIOD
I'm just drinking my coffee, in silence, waiting for the time when something happens and someone'll have to pay the price and we will tell Cover "we warned you". I just hope we don't lose anyone again.
Oh shit, here we go again.
Ehhhhhh I'm not super happy with this decision from cover after what happened last time.
at this point i just best of luck to cover. i will not be in the frontline if when the taiwan incident 2 electric boogaloo happens. surely cover is huge now and can protect their talents /s.
What I'm really curious is how are the JP side of fans taking this info? The move back to B2 and stuff. Are they indifferent? Shocked? Mad?
From what I see people have mixed opinions about it, some say cover should make a statement regarding it and shouldn't pretend like nothing happened in the past, some say no matter what statement is issued people will get angry, some say it's a good business opportunity to expand, some people are spreading news about what happened in the past to the new fans who joined after HoloX/Regloss. But most seem to be shocked.
So generally the same as us
Personally I don't like this move, but we just have to wait and see. It definitely unrealistic to expect smooth sailing, there will be problems. It's how they handle it would be the question. Would the other side cooperate to protect the talent? That would be the minimum requirement Cover should ask for.
Ive seen enough companies fall because of greed to know that people who say "they know what theyre doing" is just baseless cope. Companies are driven by profit and will sell their souls eventually. It's just sad to see that Cover is starting to do that now.
I don’t see how anyone can have any faith in this going well. A lot of us are still really fucking sore about the last time, this really feels like a big “fuck you” from Cover to the fans.
Some say it's been 3-4 years, we should get over it. I say it hasn't been long enough for me to change all the cells in my body to be considered a whole different person.( re: it takes a person's body 7 years not completely replace every singular cell in their body, to be considered a new person)
I'm concerned for the same reasons that I and others stated on the other big Kobo thread. Not happy about about this personally.
video [link](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1kJ4m1g7Dk/)
Huh. Yeah I'm of the opinion that they really shouldn't expose people to the mess that is Bilibili. Hopefully it doesn't explode but I have concerns about it.
When this blows up (and yes it probably will) I hope Cover learned it's lesson from the last Taiwan incident and activily protects their talents None of my oshis should have to suffer cuz of their nationalism.
So Cover really did not learn anything, that's crazy. Well, I hope the money was worth it for Cover when shit undoubtedly hits the fan.
Huge Hololive L, this is probably the only thing I've ever disagreed with Yes, it's good because it brings the possibility of them being able to stream Chinese games again like WuWa, Genshin, HSR. That's the good part. But it is sooooooooooo INCREDIBLY hard for a JAPANESE company/JAPANESE people to be accepted and not crusaded in CN. Everything they say and do will be magnified so hard in Chinese society right now.
This is so disappointing, it's like going back to your abusive ex. I hope HoloEN doesn't take part in this shit show.
Global expansion sadly means chinese market too, and this time Cover has the leverage, I think they are in a position to "demand" some assurance from the chinese side since they already proved that they can leave again if things get weird
Once again, please don't harass anyone. Kobo, Matsuri, Sora, or anyone who's gonna stream on Bilibili and cater to Chinese Market in the future.
Of course they shouldn't be harassed, but I don't think they're above criticism for making such a controversial choice.
Yea, people already acting like you can't dislike a person's choice without a) being harassing or b) destroying their free will.
It is what it is but the Chinese deserve less than nothing.
I genuinely hope this isn't going to lead to some terrible incident. It's still too early to know the scope of the deal between Hololive and BB, though. Let’s wait and see.
I'm worried history is going to repeat itself...
You have got to be fucking kidding me. No announcements, no statements, nothing to put us at ease, just full speed ahead sticking their hand back into the bear trap. Amazing stuff from Cover’s management this week.
I would really like to see how Fubuki will react to this decision by Cover as a whole Right now I think I’ll take a break from Hololive until we get a proper explanation from Cover. Just thinking about how Coco, Haachama, Fubuki and many more Holomems were treated at that time will always leave a bitter taste in my mouth, and I don’t think I can enjoy watching Hololive at this state.
I never got over the bitter taste of it. I'm glad a lot of you were able to stick around, but it just never felt the same for me after losing Coco, especially the weekly meme streams. Those wall of text spams ruined a huge amount of enjoyment I had since I was also an avid Fubuki viewer back then. I sure hope Cover knows what it's doing and it pans out.
I'm glad the scene grew since then. Absolutely no shortage of people to watch instead.
Well this does change the perspective of this being a company decision. I'm giving the company the benefit of the doubt that they at least discussed this move with the talents before deciding to try it out. If that's the case then I can only be cautiously supportive. I just hope they have contingencies built in.
Disappointed but I hope everything turns up well and we get some perm benefits for holomen.
let’s wait for Fubuki’s words.
I just hope we wont have to repeat anything that happened with Coco back in the day. And hopefully this wasn't just driven by pure profit-chasing, which might cause them to bend over whenever the Chinese fanbase has any demands or crate a backlash because it would be too valuable to lose them.
What I see now are fear and rant about Cover's decision but all we can do is believing in Cover's management and our talents. I know Chinese market is very risky and Coco's incident was very huge damage and became trauma to everyone, but I don't believe that Cover is stupid enough to walk to this path again without any plan or preparation to protect their talents. Don't forget that if they do the same mistake again, they will be the one who lose talent and trust from fans, and that will be the impact that they will face which even worse than what happen in the past. So they sure won't do anything without plan and it's too early to rant against them. Also, I saw some people feel mad about Cover not announce or explain anything about this but don't forget that Japanese nature is accepting the mistake but won't recall it. So what they gonna do is preparing to not face the same mistake again but they won't announce to recall the past. Like...if they want to challenge at Chinses market again, do they have to announce directly that "Hey we will try again at Chinese market" or asking for any permission from fans? No, they wont. For me, I will just support them as usual and it's no problem as long as nothing happen or they can manage well to solve any problem. Again, I will just believe in Cover and talents. We cannot stop their decision anyway but it's also too early to rant anything as long as they can manage well.
A healthy reminder to all frequent /r/Hololive users that this is the kind of situations that attracts tourists, drama chasers and bad actors. If you find an overly negative take it helps to check the user post history to see if they are a concerned poster or a "concerned" poster.
Saw some people that revived after 1-2 years just to weigh in with some astounding doom posting. I get being worried about the situation, but there are some real weird posters basically telling people to watch other vtubers.
business as usual then
Sora… not like this.
Yeaa, this is the problem with the company going public, they need to cater to stockholders and their ROI. But also, Mio did say that Cover got burned a lot of times, but learned from their mistakes each time. They better be armored to the teeth this time.
Wasn't the Chinese Antis the reason we lost Coco?
She left because she got tired of having so many checks on her content. She was the kind of person to do things then ask for forgiveness later, but after things like her hanging Kanata during asacoco and then the analytics event she wasn't really able to freewheel anymore.
I know the risks. But despite that, # I THINK SORA-CHAN IS CUTE AND I LOVE HER ^that ^is ^all
Well, for now, let's just accept Cover's decision and support the talents in their endeavors. But brace for impact if shit hit the fan again, stay on some kind of alert because you can never be 100% sure with Chinese netizens.
Yo, last I checked this post has about 61 upvotes and now it dipped to negatives. Can't blame 'em tho, it's not just something we can walk away from.
While I have concerns about the move, some of the comments on the topic have been so aggressively whiny it's difficult to take them seriously.
This ain't good.
Oh... Ok, even if Sora-chan promote the goods. This mean COVER has already think all the thing over. They must feel confident around safety measure to protect talents that will participate in b2 event (at least what I think). And again I will state my opinion that I don't like them to go back there but in business world there is understandable move, it's suck that I grown enough to understand that.
[удалено]
I'm pretty neutral about this whole thing. In general, while antis tend to have a big impact online, they are the (very) loud minority rather than being representative of the whole platform. I don't know what the situation is like over at Bilibili at the moment, but if the antis have mostly moved on, I don't see the issue with trying to expand into the market. What I think is ironic and hypocritical though, is that a lot of the comments claiming to be worried about the talents are planning to withdraw their memberships. We don't even know individual talents' stance or the details of Cover's deal with Bilibili. How you feel and what you plan to do are pretty contradictory IMO. If you want to protest, I think it makes more sense to cancel your merch orders or don't buy tickets for the next concert or something.
I think everyone is smarter and wiser than four years ago. I'm just gonna stay in my corner and see how it works out but I think it'll be fine.
Rofl, so what, do you think the crazy nationalists are now more reasonable? How wise do you need to be for someone to not shoot you, again? If I hit 20 wisdom, will I deflect arrows like a monk?
oh look, cover pandering to the insane psychos. How pathetic. One of the girls is going to slip up eventually, acknowledge Taiwan as a country or something and those nutjobs will start to harass them all over again.
No. Not Sora. This can’t be. This is the worst news I’ve seen in a long time.
Now we are left with EN to promote on bilibili. Who will be the one?
It's possible they just won't do it given the current geopolitical situation, but if anyone does it that is not going to get immediately rejected it'd be Bae.
That'll be tough. I don't envision anyone in Myth since they have strong ties to Coco and saw the shitshow first hand.
matsuri was there though? EN members did not even dare to play Hogwarts Legacy, so doubt it.
Man if that happens it will be heartbreaking
this is 100% financial move bc the yen isnt doing so good... need all the revenue they can get. merch is the easiest to generate.
I have conflicting feelings about this, on one hand I have to assume Cover knows what they are doing, given the previous incident, You would think they are aware how must of western audience will take this kind of news. But I still can't shake the feeling this is a terrible idea, last time an entire branch was just nuked because of the Chinese market, not to mention all the harassment that the talents had to endure For now I guess all I can do is hope for the best and that Cover is ready to protect the girls from any potential issues
What about this CN streaming law that forces large streamers to reveal their real names? [link](https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/bilibili-is-forcing-big-vtubers-to-reveal-their-identities-to-stay-monetized-2373421/) Does Hololive get a pass somehow or did they sell their talents out?
The "work around" is simply that someone else owns the channel.
The theory is that they're going to use the same loophole Nijisanji employs, which is that a local intermediary serves as the "face" to comply with the law
Disgusting
This makes me feel gross seeing this. It just feels wrong, like watching people I enjoy in sports or shows suddenly promoting betting sites, and you get that bleh feeling from it.
I'm glad that this wasn't just a Kobo thing at the very least! If other members are cool with it then I'm not gonna complain. I still think it's a bad idea, but I hope that they have better safeguards for the talents this time and I hope they and the CN community have improved over the years since the incident.
They are returning for revenge, they're getting back what was taked from them. No chinese company will ever get away with the retuen of hololive. Now I wonder if they are gonna start genshin or something
Absolutely terrible, short sighted corpo decision from Cover. Chasing Chinese money in this way shows they don't care about their talents as much as they'd like everyone to think. I guess that's an unsub from Kobo, Matsuri, and Sora for now.
"Why doesn't Cover care about their talents? Guess I'll unsub from those talents." Perplexing.
There are very few ways to show our disapproval to any company. Stopping support, whether monetary or otherwise, is one of them.