#oneaday Day 857: Virtual pleasantries

I know it's not something everyone enjoys, but personally I'm so glad that VTubers have become such a widespread thing. With a few notable exceptions, I consistently find that I enjoy watching VTubers do general streaming and YouTube stuff more than "real" people — though you still can't beat a good specialist for specific subject matter like, say, retro gaming or something like that.

Which got me wondering: at the moment, most VTubers tend to be variety entertainers with something of an emphasis on reasonably current gaming — either big names or, more commonly, indie darlings. I wonder if we'll get to a point where we'll see "specialist" VTubers focusing on more specific subject matter — like a retro gaming VTuber or something like that. There's probably an argument to be made that some VTubers like Inugami Korone err on the retro side of things already, but they're still mostly variety streams, just with a slight weighting in one direction of another.

Quite possibly the issue is that specialist subject matter, outside of breakout cases that become inexplicably popular or hit the magic formula in the YouTube algorithm, tends not to do numbers as big as those seen in "general interest" fields. For every person who knows their stuff about obscure Commodore 64 games, there are approximately five hundred generic white girls who only ate food they saw on TikTok for a week — and the generic Live Laugh Lovers are the ones with the hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

In a way that makes the person who knows their stuff about obscure Commodore 64 games all the more precious because they're not beholden to the whims of what is likely quite a fickle audience and can instead focus on their own thing — but it's doubtless something that is on the mind of anyone considering getting into VTubing.

VTubing is not an easy or cheap field to get into if you're serious about doing it, after all — sure, you can download VRoid Studio and Wakaru to get started for free, but if you want to look like something other than a relatively generic 3D model with minimal tracking, you're going to need to commission art and rigging as well as investing in equipment that makes your on-screen movements much more natural. And that naturally means a lot of people who have made that investment will want to increase the likelihood that they see some sort of return on said investment — which of course leads to them favouring more general-interest streams and videos.

I don't really have a point here and certainly don't feel I personally have the talent (or technical knowledge) to become some sort of amazing retro gaming specialist VTubing star — but I do think it would be interesting to see such a thing at some point. And I think that eventually we will actually see that — look at how YouTube videos and streaming have broadened as forms of media over the years, after all.

As the tech — both hardware and software — becomes more accessible, I suspect we'll see more and more people stepping up to give VTubing a try, and wanting to make themselves stand out through specialisms. It may even empower some people who have always shied away from making videos or doing streams because they're worried about appearing on camera, despite having the knowledge or talent to be able to make something work — and that'd be wonderful to see.

In the meantime, it's not as if we're short on VTubers to enjoy already — I suspect there's someone to suit most moods at this point. With that in mind, I'm off to watch Ame be bad at Oblivion some more. Good night!