Vtubers take over of Japanese esports with Apex Legends

The thing about being a vtuber, new or otherwise, is that you tend to get caught up with Japanese internet culture trends, at some levels, by sheer osmosis. Though the scene in the west is growing fast (with waiting lists for the most respected Live2D rigging artists stretching months into the future), it still takes most of its cues from the Japanese agencies and creators that best represent the overall medium.

That means two things. One, a lot of familiarity with the activities from the Hololive and Nijisanji vtuber agencies in particular.

Two, as a result, Respawn Entertainment has basically annexed your YouTube subscriptions.

Apex vtubers ascendant

To say there is a healthy interest in Apex Legends among Japanese streamers is to understate it. The game tops the rankings and is among the most viewed games in the country. Even its casual invitationals attract diehard levels of audience support – numbers usually associated with League of Legends or Counter-Strike broadcasts here in the west. The recently concluded fourth iteration of the Crazy Raccoon Cup, for instance, wasn’t just a showcase for pro players of the organization that gave the circuit its name.

It was, instead, a 300,000+ viewer festival of bullets and grenades across both Twitch.tv and YouTube, not to mention other, more localized streaming services, thanks largely to the guest-competitors involved.

That’s not to say that Crazy Raccoon’s pros weren’t part of the draw. The organization’s stable of pro players are among the most exciting talents in the North Asia-Pacific competitive circuit, well reputed for the violence and mayhem they bring into the battlefield.

But as talented and popular as South Korean gunner Ras is (and 129,000 followers on Twitch.tv is a far cry from a laughing matter), he isn’t as much of a draw as, say… manga-ka Aka Akasaka of popular comic and anime series Kaguya-sama: Love is War.

Nor is he as big of a draw as handsome vampire and awkward introvert Kuzuha, currently the most popular male vtuber in the world with more than 750,000 subscribers on YouTube. As well, Hololive’s summer-colored schoolgirl of outrageous anecdotes, Natsuiro Matsuri, draws a crowd with a staggering subscriber count at well over 900,000. That puts her roughly in the middle of her agency’s pack, given how wildly successful their content model proved to be in a post-pandemic world.

There’s no disputing the fact that the game has its grip on the island nation – especially not with its animations beaming down upon you from the vast screens overlooking the streets of Shibuya. But the “how” and “why” of how that happened is a bit of a harder nut to crack. The aspects of vtuber culture that filters from east to west rely heavily on the work of fan translators of varying qualities – and that means viewers mostly get the supercuts of the most amusing, meme-worthy moments.

Those are great, of course. The grease on the rails that drop viewers swiftly into the vtuber rabbit hole. People start with a cute anime dog girl making funny noises while playing Banjo-Kazooie and they end up memorizing an entire national library’s worth of in-jokes and character canons. But a self-styled hungry ghost vtuber isn’t going to be satisfied with the mere crumbs available on the western internet.

So, to find as close to an answer as anyone without Japanese fluency can get, I got a full-fledged response from EA’s esports operations.

Riding the wave