Is the Vtuber Trend over?

I’ve seen a lot of people ask this question in recent months. The trigger seems to be the fact that most Vtubers have noticed a drop in viewership this year. This has sparked a lot of debate about if the bubble has finally burst. Polygon even wrote an article about this that seemed to not look at the real data.

Twitch is falling.

The data is here. 2022 Twitch had over a 10% drop in viewership. 2023 looks like it might be worse. Almost every month this year has been lower than it was a year prior. Now the Quarter 3 numbers have been released. Twitch viewership continues to drop but YouTube Live has been growing massively. Maybe it’s not so much that the Vtuber bubble has burst, but only that the Twitch bubble has burst? Most English Vtubers (and streamers in general) are on Twitch. When Twitch is doing worse, of course the Vtubers would do worse as well. Perhaps it’s time to move to YouTube?

The amount of hours watched on YouTube live has seen a massive spike of over 9%, while Twitch’s viewership dropped slightly compared to Q2 2023.

Twitch viewership has been dropping every month.

Meanwhile, YouTube’s streaming viewership has skyrocketed by over a billion hours in August compared to just a month prior. But even July was a bit higher for YouTube than it was for Twitch.

So while Twitch has been falling, YouTube has been growing massively. Is this the the real answer? Are Vtubers just the victim in Twitch’s fall? Or maybe…

Streaming is falling.

In recent years, we saw a massive spike in the number of streamers as well as viewers. But there was an even larger spike in “Short-form” content. This might be where the real answer is. Most viewership nowadays seems to be going to Short-form content such as YouTube Shorts and Tiktok. The average viewer of content in modern times seems to have a much shorter attention span. Short-form content is thriving while streaming, at least on Twitch, is losing viewership every month. Maybe Vtubers need to step back and consider that streaming isn’t the way to go anymore. Vtubers started off making edited/pre-recorded content on YouTube. Kizuna Ai lead the way. Then Nijisanji and Hololive pushed the market forward with live streaming. Perhaps that era is ending and Vtubers need to adjust again; this time to Short-form content.

Whichever the correct answer is, I don’t believe the “Vtuber Bubble” itself has burst. The real issue is definitely with streaming itself. Whether it’s the platform or the entire concept of streaming, I can’t say. But I think there’s still a large audience for Vtubers.

Don’t give up yet.

Capture Cards are frustrating

In 2020, I bought a Capture Card so I could stream BOTW. It seemed amazing at first. Everything “worked” fairly easily with no major issues. I was content. But over the years I’ve learned about so many problems most people don’t even notice.

The second biggest issue that apparently people don’t notice is the color accurately is always wrong. Even at its most accurate it’s slightly incorrect. For streaming sites this is a minor issue because the compression makes it wrong anyway. But for local recordings and even just viewing on OBS, it’s frustrating to see once you know notice (it’s most easily noticed by having OBS preview full-screen directly next to a Pass-through of the game on another monitor, or just changing inputs very quickly if your display is able). I’ll admit I’m probably a lot pickier about quality than most people but my 4k60 Pro mk2 cost over $200 so I expected perfection… There’s also a lot of issues regarding correct RGB settings with software such as OBS and 4k Capture Utility detecting things wrong but that’s too complicated to get into today.

The biggest issue is audio issues. This honesty wasn’t something I had experienced much the first year or so that I used my card and I’m not sure what the actual cause is but it doesn’t seem to occur very often when streaming Nintendo Switch games. However, it always happens when streaming PS4 Pro and PS5. I have no experience with XBOX.

When streaming on the Playstation systems, it starts off fine by the audio slowly drifts until it is somewhere between 0.5 and a full second delayed from the video footage. The fact that it drifts slowly means setting an offset doesn’t really help. Turning the capture card off and on via the source on OBS (Deactivate) resets the audio but the issue will always happen again after another 2-3 hours. It’s beyond irritating.

Related to that, often times the audio just completely breaks. It will sometimes suddenly become muffled, as if underwater. Or just not record anything at all. This is extra frustrating due to the fact that on the audio monitor is sounds completely fine! I can only know the audio is broken when viewers tell me or worse – when checking the recording/stream VOD. It’s very bizarre and inconvenient that the audio breaking doesn’t affect monitoring. Doesn’t that defeat the entire purpose of “monitoring”?

None of these things are an issue when streaming games on PC. The color is always exactly as seen. The audio is always recording the way you hear it with no drift. It’s just so much more simple. Gaming on consoles is more simple than on PC, but streaming is the complete opposite thanks to these common issues with capture cards. And yes, they are common. Most people just don’t really notice (or care). Nearly every stream I open at the very least has the color settings wrong. Less often the audio is slightly off. But there’s almost always some issue that I can notice.

At the very least, most games are coming to PC with the exception of Nintendo games. I pray for a miracle world where Nintendo releases games on PC

Terror in anime

I was thinking recently about truly scary anime. Horror anime doesn’t scare me. Horror anime is more often funny than it is scary. War is what I think is truly terrifying. However, few anime have really portrayed it well.

One anime that I always think of when I think of a truly terrifying war and destruction is the original Macross (and Do You Remember Love? movie). Spoilers for a 40-year-old anime, but the world gets destroyed. The planet is hammered by weapons of mass destruction and even in the 80s the animation captured the horror of it all. When I watched Shin Godzilla destroy Tokyo, it made me think about Macross.

I couldn’t find good video of it but here’s a clip of some other scenes that were terrifying

YouTube vs Twitch

I’ve spent the last few months testing a lot. Twitch and YouTube are honestly both bad at “Discoverbility”. Twitch is good if you want to browse a certain category but small streamers get buried. Small streamers need friends and luck to get raid to get higher in the sorting. YouTube is better for recommendations. Twitch only seems to to recommend streams with 30 viewers or more. YouTube will recommend even streams with 1 viewer, and it recommends a lot. Searching for a game will also show any stream. But browsing games is awful on YouTube.Both sites require a lot of luck to get noticed though. Basically every big streamer now days says to use edited content on Tiktok or YouTube to get noticed on either Twitch or YouTube. But even that requires luck to even get 1 view from algorithms.

2022

2021 went by too fast. It’s depressing. I didn’t accomplish anything that I wanted to do.

2022 might be worse. I have less money now than ever. I can’t keep up with the trends needed for growth. There’s so many things to buy. Too many games that are $60-$70 each. I need a new guitar if I want to do music streams. I’d like another model/costume at some point too. Everything is too expensive. More than anything I’d like to go to the doctor and dentist but those require thousands, possibly tens of thousands of dollars I don’t have.

The end of the year is always a sad reminder of the painful things. And of our failures.

Pixel 6 Pro Part 4

I fixed the temperature issue. I wanted to wait a few days before I considered it fixed. All I did was disable the “Smooth Display” feature and then turned it back on. I assume there was some bug with the feature that resolved by turning the feature off and on.

My 30 watt charger also arrived, directly from Google. When I ordered it I had not seen the reports that it doesn’t actually charge at 30 watts. In fact, it’s charging about the same speed as my old 18 watt charger. I also think the software for the charging is bugged. Other people wrote that it charges from 0 to 100 around 2 hours. It took my P6Pro over 3 hours for a full charge. It’s absolutely ridiculous and I hope Google fixes it with an update. Monitoring software showed it charged extremely fast sometimes but would heavily slow down.

Pixel 6 Pro Part 3 (Temperature)

Temperature issues are big. I’ll compare it to my old Pixel 2.

Pixel 2 idles around 26 Celsius while the Pixel 6 Pro idles around 28 Celsius. That’s honestly not too bad. However, usage of any kind spikes the temperature.

For comparison, the Pixel 2 averages around 35 Celsius when in use for several hours. This is doing normal things such as Reddit or Facebook, Discord chat and imgur. Meanwhile, the Pixel 6 Pro with very light usage of a single one of those apps such as Reddit will spike the temperature to around 38 to 40° Celsius in just a few minutes, and oftentimes it’ll go up to 44 or 45° Celsius. It should be noted that the Pixel 6 Pro has some software protection in it so that the Google photos backup stops working at 40°. This is not an issue on the Pixel 2. The camera also stops working at 45° on the Pixel 6 Pro. So just using regular browsing apps or chatting on Discord for several minutes will make the Google photos backup and camera unusable for a long period of time because the only way to lower the temperature is to stop using the phone for about an hour or so. In other words, major features of this phone become unusable just by using the phone for a few minutes.

On the Pixel 2, watching high resolution YouTube videos will increase the temperature to about 42° Celsius and sometimes higher, and Pixel 6 Pro gets to about the same temperature doing the same thing. However, the difference here is that the Pixel 2 will go back down to 35 Celsius or around there after about 2 minutes of closing the YouTube video. Meanwhile the Pixel 6 Pro will stay around 40° Celsius until you leave the phone alone for a long period of time. It simply will not cool off unless it is idle. This makes me think maybe the issue is actually related to the OS and it’s just not letting the phone cool off.

The strangest thing is that the temperature of the Pixel 6 Pro does not really correlate to CPU usage, sometimes the temperature increases when there is basically no CPU usage and sometimes the temperature remains low when CPU usage is very high. For example, earlier I was watching Twitch and the temperature remained 36 Celsius for a good 20 minutes, but then suddenly even though nothing changed in terms of CPU usage, the temperature spiked all the way up to 44°.

To finish this blog post, I’ll show you that while I wrote this, the temperature increased from 28° when I started all the way up to 40° when I finished it. The only thing I had opened was the WordPress app. That’s all, one app. The average CPU usage is only about 30% and yet the temperature spiked this much. This only took me about 20 minutes to write. There’s just no logic to it so I think it’s an OS problem.

28c to 40c from one app in around 15 minutes

I’ve seen a lot of people mention this heat issue with the Pixel 6 Pro. There’s also a lot of deniers but there’s clearly something wrong with a lot of phones. I’m sure plenty of phones are working fine, but Google really needs to address the issue for the many people that do have this problem. A device with this price point should work 100% properly.

Pixel 6 Pro Part 2

It’s now been 4 days that I’ve used this phone. It’s been amazing in every way except for one thing…

First off, Android 12 is actually amazing. But it’s got some small bugs that are annoying such as DND for Gaming not working sometimes. But it’s minor things. The biggest issue is that the phone gets really hot. After watching YouTube for awhile or playing Bang Dream, the temperature spikes from the mid 30c range to around 43c. Even after closing the games, the temperature doesn’t drop unless I leave the phone alone for like an hour. Even just browsing Reddit prevents the temperature from going back down. It’s strange and I hope an update can fix this. But my Pixel 2 actually hit these same temperature range when I tested it today. It’s more noticeable on the 6 Pro because of the glass back. But the main reason I noticed is because Google Photos refused to backup files due to the device being too hot when it was 41c. Again, I hope this gets fixed. Everything else has been nearly perfect.

Pixel 6 Pro early thoughts

This phone is heavy and the screen is much bigger than I expected. This is all a good thing because I watch a lot of videos on my phone and I will probably play a lot of Bang Dream. So far the only issue is that I get dropped inputs in Bang Dream while recording but this has always been an issue with that game and I’m pretty sure this phone has enough power to do it properly.

So far, one of the better features is the voice typing with Google Assistant. It’s super accurate and fast even with high speed talking. This is going to be a very useful feature for me when I feel lazy.

I’ll update this post in a few days.

Not abandoned.

I couldn’t log into the website for like 6 months on desktop – only mobile worked. There was no way I was going to type blogposts on mobile lol. Anyway, I’ll probably switch focus from Gaming/Anime to Gaming/Vtuber actives since that’s what I’m doing with my life now. I’ll probably post the first images of my Live2D on here in a month or so.