I Lost My Job
Natural disasters and calamities have a habit of arriving somewhat out of nowhere.
You wake up one morning to hear that an earthquake hit somewhere, or that torrential rain flooded some other place. Those are the kinds of news that reach you late, riding in on the coattails of emergency alerts.
They come in truly every variety. Sometimes a disaster strikes with literally no warning at all — and sometimes it doesn't. There are so-called warning signs you can catch in advance. But unless you're someone who analyzes these things for a living — and even then, the symptoms are often so faint and so ambiguous that even the professionals can't say with any certainty whether a catastrophe is actually coming — there's no way to know.
And so, when the disaster finally did arrive, the world was plunged into chaos.
It was the news of Twish Korea's withdrawal.
Whatever the issue, whenever something like this happens, the person who hears about it first always ends up wandering from place to place spreading the word. So by the time barely an hour had passed since the official announcement, articles were already out and the news had reached every community on the internet.
It was a cauldron of pure shock. An unprecedented apocalypse. One of the twin pillars of the internet streaming world had collapsed. For the internet ghosts who spent their lives watching streams, this was every bit as serious as their own house caving in.
It wasn't as if there had been no warning signs at all. For months now, Twish Korea had been dealing with degraded video quality, deleted VODs, and similar problems. People had believed it would stop at that — but unfortunately, it seemed that wasn't the case.
At any rate, the situation was clear: before long, the house would come down completely. Everyone living inside it needed to find a new place to live.
The streamers who broadcast on Twish heard the news and scrambled to go live, starting to discuss their options.
Fortunately, the choices weren't locked down to a single platform. Setting aside Daeryuk — the other half of the twin-peak streaming landscape alongside Twish — there was one newly rising platform as well.
"I already put in my beta application… So which platform am I going to? I don't know. How am I supposed to decide that right away? Shouldn't I at least try simultaneous streaming first and then figure it out?"
That platform was Jijijik — the brand-new streaming service developed by N Company.
One person's crisis is another person's opportunity, or so they say. The moment word got out that Twish — the giant of internet broadcasting — was pulling out of Korea, N Company seized the opening and immediately spun up a brand-new platform. Sharp, ruthless judgment befitting a major corporation. It had only just been built, so there were still plenty of rough edges and inconveniences here and there.
There was also the option of streaming through Vtube's live feature, but that got rejected for various functional reasons — chat management being difficult, among other things. In the end, it came down to Daeryuk or Jijijik.
Only two options, sure — but still better than being forced to pick one with tears in your eyes.
"Ugh, what am I supposed to do about this. Do I have something planned? Not nothing, but… I don't know. The announcement only came out yesterday. I just heard about it myself. There's still time, so I'll think it over more before deciding."
The man currently streaming — streamer Limetaq — clutched his head, looking thoroughly pained.
He already suffered from the chronic modern affliction known as decision paralysis. Under normal circumstances, his viewers would have been yelling at him to stop whining and just pick something already. This time, though, they only clicked their tongues or fretted along with him, without really scolding him.
Fair enough. This wasn't a decision you could make lightly. It was every bit as nerve-wracking as moving house or changing jobs.
Someone might say, just pick Daeryuk or the new platform, whatever, and go — but it wasn't that simple. Viewer attrition that naturally came with switching platforms, cultural differences between platforms, the backlash from your audience that those differences produced… From a streamer's perspective, there was more than one or two things to consider.
A classic example: Daeryuk carried a frame that its image was just dirty.
Some people didn't care at all — same streaming platform, what's there to call dirty or clean? — while others flat-out refused to watch Daeryuk streams because they were vulgar and trashy. And there were quite a few of the latter type inside Twish. Even on Limetaq's stream right now, there were viewers insisting Daeryuk was absolutely not an option.
"Hey, nothing's decided yet and you're already losing it. Don't trash other platforms — I might end up going to Daeryuk. No, that's not official, I'm just saying I might. You never know with people."
Soothing the viewers who were showing open hostility toward Daeryuk, and banning a few who were throwing around extreme language, Limetaq continued.
"I think I need to see where the big corps go first. If the major streamers make their decisions, it'll be easier for me to decide too. Taker-nim hasn't gone live yet, right? Or Kayak-nim. Ugh, those people must have a headache too."
Strictly speaking, Limetaq was a mid-tier streamer — the kind who hovered between a thousand and two thousand concurrent viewers. Even if you were new to the platform, you could find him by scrolling about halfway down. He'd originally been smaller, but after the Abyss Streamer Tournament his regular viewership had jumped by a few hundred.
Limetaq wasn't particularly sharp, and he wasn't especially quick on the uptake either — but this time, his viewers actually agreed with what he was saying.
The major streamers who regularly pulled ten thousand, even close to twenty thousand viewers, literally dragged audiences around with them. Depending on their choices, the decisions of mid-tier and small-time streamers like Limetaq would shift accordingly.
The communities were watching that side of things most closely too. Where would Twish's pillars head? Where would Taker go? Where would Kayak go?
In particular, people were most curious about Kayak's next move — she'd been steadily active lately and had even broken into terrestrial TV.
And so, with all that attention piled high on Kayak's future path—
The house has collapsed.
Kayak's stream went on.
I'd expected it, but damn, this was chaos. Then again — your platform dies overnight and you don't get this kind of reaction? That would be the real absurdity.
Somewhere along the way, I'd carved out a pretty solid position inside Twish. And I could feel it — people were hanging on my every word.
But right now, I didn't have any particular thoughts either. I wasn't all that different from them, in other words.
I'd only heard about the issue a few hours ago myself. I'd turned on the stream just to talk it over with the viewers, that was all.
"Hello, yeah yeah. Everyone calm down first. Is the mic crackling supposed to mean Jijijik…? I haven't made any decisions yet. Is the mic quality bad? Ahh."
"I already put in the beta application before coming, yeah. That's partly why I'm a bit late. It's not confirmed Jijijik, so stop making weird assumptions. I might try Jijijik and still end up going to Daeryuk."
The moment I mentioned I might go to Daeryuk, the chat window started thrashing.
A few messages said Daeryuk was fine, but the vast majority wanted me on Jijijik. Ratio-wise, maybe two to eight?
I'd turned on the stream to gauge viewer reactions in the first place, but seeing this made me genuinely curious all over again.
Why did these people hate Daeryuk so much? As someone who'd only ever watched a handful of Abyss-related streams and called that "internet broadcasting," I had no idea.
"I can't go to Daeryuk? Why not?"
So I asked again, and concrete answers came back.
Hmm. All kinds of thoughts. It felt a little like they had a sense of belonging to the platform, and a little like they had a superiority complex… Twish is clean, Daeryuk is dirty, that kind of thing.
Whether the viewers were right or wrong, I had no way of knowing. I'd never experienced Daeryuk myself.
But watching them thrash around like that somehow stirred up a contrarian streak in me — and I ended up letting a little of my future plans slip.
"I'm going to try both Daeryuk and Jijijik at least once before deciding… I didn't realize you all hated Daeryuk this much."
It was a kind of emotional control.
With just a single sentence, I could steer the chat's reactions. That was the kind of being I was.
Watching the viewers react so intensely, I felt a strangely pleasant feeling and quietly smiled to myself.