Commentary: We Should Not Miss Dokibird’s Big Breakthrough

2024年12月19日

Dokibird is one of the talents that has made a particular breakthrough in the VTuber industry in 2024. Because it is no exaggeration to say that her success this year has changed the VTuber industry.

Restarting from Adversity

In February, Dokibird was terminated from her contract with the Virtual Streamer Group, where she had been working in different character roles. The company not only released written statements about how she was in breach of her contract, but also had other talents say so, and even released a statement saying that the impact on performance was extremely negligible. If one were to believe these statements, one would think that Dokibird was an unscrupulous person who had done the company a great deal of damage.

However, the international community fully supported Dokibird and declared the company a “Black Company". In addition to recognizing Dokibird’s significant activities during her tenure as a talent in the group, they were quick to examine the inconsistencies in the company’s announcement, placing the company and the group in the center of some of the fiercest criticism of “Black Company" in the history of the industry. In addition, some companies announced that they would no longer do business with the company. The group lost more than 2 million subscribers to its YouTube channels, its stock price plummeted, and its CEO released a apology video.

This series of issues became one of the leading topics of 2024.

As a result, the company and its group are still moving toward the bottom of the crisis, with a significant decrease in overseas sales, and not only is the recovery extremely difficult, but the company is in fact on the verge of losing its business outside Japan. Quite to the contrary, Dokibird, a returning indie VTuber talent, has been relaunched and is on the verge of a major breakthrough.

Major Breakthrough After Return of Indie

This year, Dokibird has collaborated with numerous agency and indie talents, various companies, and participated in conventions. This was not the case for someone who had been expelled from a company as a “breach of contract". This is proof that her past activities, achievements, personality, and attitude have earned her the trust of many people and companies.

In addition, her official YouTube channel subscribers surpassed 800K on December 11. Thus, she became the VTuber talent that showed a particularly remarkable growth this year.

On December 14, she held a live event “Fantôme Thief’s Revenge" with Mint Fantôme, who is also a former talent of the same company, and with whom she has a close relationship. Mint, like Doki, has also been a breakthrough talent this year, and their end of the year collaboration was a symbolic scene of their breakthrough this year. Many Dragoon fans cheered her on.

Changed the Industry

Although our media is from Japan, what Doki has accomplished this year is by no means a local event across the ocean.

The creation of a process to determine where the blame lies, with solid evidence and verification, has led to the exit from the mainstream of problematic targets such as the company Doki was affiliated with. Furthermore, the momentum to build a healthy community that does not tolerate speculation and slander without evidence and sources of information may have had a small influence on the fans’ calm action over the changes that came to hololive Production in late November.

The VTuber industry has become remarkably globalized and is certain to develop more and more as a single market in the future. And this year, she has clearly made a big impact on the VTuber industry as a whole and changed it.

That wave will be even larger in 2025.

Japanese Version

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