Death Stranding 2 is stuffed with all sorts of ridiculous cameos, but one of the most bizarre inclusions is extremely popular Japanese-speaking vtuber Usada Pekora. Even though it's no surprise at this point to see Hideo Kojima find a way to insert his favorite celebrities into his games, the CEO of the company Pekora streams for is aiming to have many more collabs in the future.
Speaking to PC Gamer in a recent interview (through a translator), the CEO of Cover, the company that owns vtuber agency Hololive, Motoaki Tanigo, said introducing vtubers to gamers is a big goal right now.
Hololive's Japanese vtubers show up in games and other media quite often. Inugami Korone has official DLC for Sonic Frontiers and Hoshimachi Suisei performs a song in Gundam GQuuuuuuX. On the English-speaking side, however, they're not as common. Tanigo says he wants to "have such collaborations in the same capacity in the US as well."
He said the explosion of vtubers in the West has expanded the audience from just anime fans and that collaborations like the one with Death Stranding 2 help Hololive "reach a wider audience of people who wouldn't come across vtubers."
Cover recently opened up an office in the U.S. to help make these connections with game developers and publishers more regularly.
Part of this push toward gaming will also include streaming on Twitch, which he says wasn't a priority before because it's not super popular in Japan. "We built up our fan base mainly on YouTube up to this point, but as we want to hit a gaming audience, it's very likely that we will focus more on Twitch in the future," he said.
Tanigo says that Hololive will "look toward having more talent that can play games that are popular in the US," like competitive FPS games. The goal, as I understand it, is to have Hololive vtubers cultivate an audience tied to specific genres or games like any other steamer on Twitch and to let that lead to sponsorships and collabs in the future.
Does that mean we're going to see vtuber skins in Call of Duty? It sounds like Tanigo wouldn't say no to that, and by the looks of it, neither would Activision. My hope is that when they do show up it's as inexplicable as delivering pizza to a bunny girl.
