Going Hard Today Too
December 19th, Monday.
The weekend had passed, and the streets were slowly taking on that end-of-year atmosphere.
If some basement-dwelling keyboard warrior demanded to know how I knew that when I barely ever left the house, I'd have nothing to say for myself.
I just figured it was the kind of line you throw out once in a while when the year-end rolls around.
The streaming scene was no different.
Pangea TV's annual year-end awards ceremony was approaching, as it did every year.
The scheduled date was December 30th.
Barely ten days left now.
"The year's almost over already."
A calendar whose pages I sometimes even forgot to turn.
Already the last page of 2022—I felt a pang of bittersweetness first.
About three months since my regression.
Looking back, so much had happened.
Roughly a month of debut preparation.
Those had been times of truly intense effort.
If I'd put that kind of effort into studying, acing the college entrance exam might not have been just a dream.
I still remembered my debut stream clearly.
The day before, I'd carefully planned my strategy and posted promotional bait on the FM Community to draw aggro.
And the bold investments I'd made in Pangea TV stock.
Ah, come to think of it, not much time left.
Once 2023 arrived, buying Pangea TV stock on the first trading day would send it soaring for a while.
With that, I wouldn't have to worry about money for the time being.
This month, aside from preparing the Christmas carol songs, I haven't spent much.
If I applied for a cash-out next week, combined with what I already had, I'd be able to invest roughly forty million won.
And in January, I'd convert every bit of earnings and buy more Pangea TV stock.
I remembered buying in the sixty-thousand-won range and selling in the ninety-thousand-won range.
The most memorable part was still the Wooga-dol audition, wasn't it?
During the Wooga-dol audition period, I'd thrown myself into it fiercely and built my current fandom.
Most of my fandom, the Seo-a Corps, had formed then.
There had been viewers from before, but they were more of the light, casual type.
The hardcore fans of today had slowly stewed into rich broth by immersing themselves in me through that grueling audition period.
Come to think of it, Freeca is still going strong.
Before the regression, it had been Kyu-rings… now, after going through the Na-ro-si incident, their fandom had solidified even more internally.
They'd started properly running a YouTube channel, and fan cafe activity was lively.
But they still had the look of an isolated island.
Pushing the idol concept hard and trying to walk a different path from Pangea TV's existing broadcast culture meant the floating viewer base didn't pay them much attention, and they were surviving solely on the pie from the Wooga-dol audition days.
Of course, even that alone put them on a completely different starting line compared to other virtual streamers.
They easily maintained an average of three to four hundred viewers.
When they had good content or teamed up with Ssa-yo, they sometimes hit four digits.
But because they aimed for an excessively clean broadcast culture to maintain the idol concept, their Candy donations were lacking relative to their size.
The fact that not a single Freeca member made it into the top ten of the December virtual streamer Candy donation rankings proved it.
In terms of broadcast size alone, they ranked first to fourth in Pangea TV's virtual scene.
In the end, money's the problem. Money… Ssa-yo's also been held back by money.
I'd said it once before, but the unique strength of virtual streamers that could overwhelm human streamers was technical capability, I thought.
Virtual broadcasts that freely transcended spatial limitations and showcased the future technologies viewers had only imagined.
But that all came down to money.
No individual in Korea could afford that.
Even for corporations, they only occasionally showed their faces for events; none sustained such expensive virtual content long-term.
It would shake the very foundations of the company.
Still, someday virtual will take its place as the main of the market. Just like AI technology has started replacing many fields.
As technology continued to develop, the phenomenon of virtual establishing itself in the streaming scene would become clearer.
Maybe even the big corporate streamers, once they got older and judged that their aging appearance was a broadcast minus, might try converting to virtual streamers.
Hey, isn't that too much of a leap?
Haha! No one knows what the future holds.
Who would have ever guessed that the virtual scene would boom on Pangea TV in the first place.
The long-standing tradition dating back to the StarCraft days was the rejection of no-cam broadcasters.
Yet for virtual, which could be called its superior version, they were showing such a generous attitude.
Still, it's not there yet. The StarCraft scene still rejects virtuals, and fans of human streamers just see it as some otaku culture.
For that perception to fully change, we'd have to go through the Rena World period.
With Kim Hak-do at the very front, followed by Park Bong-sik, Jamst, Lee Seong-ho, Wang-ko, Baek-gu…
All the influential big-name streamers would play Minecraft and get tangled up with virtual streamers.
Naturally, the fans of those big streamers would encounter virtual streamers every day through their main broadcasters' screens and become completely used to them.
That change hadn't happened overnight.
It was a change that built up bit by bit over a full half-year.
By the time Rena World ended, you could no longer find any demeaning comments about virtuals in the chat of big streamer broadcasts.
Virtual culture had finally taken root on Pangea TV.
There's something the virtuals and their fans who flooded in after Rabbit TV Korea shut down its service are mistaken about—Pangea TV's virtual scene wasn't just created out of nothing.
It was because of the fierce struggles and efforts of the 720p virtuals fighting for survival that the latecomers could easily find their place in the market.
And that history was still ongoing.
Because right now, Rena World was announcing its full-fledged start.
"Hello, I'm Dananyang. It's nice that everyone's welcoming me like this."
On the 19th, a new partner streamer moved into Rena World through the Taesan selection process.
Having seen the virtuals from Bad Potato Company clinging to Mist and sucking up the sweet leftovers, this time the other virtuals didn't hesitate and were already staking out their positions from the start.
Dananyang looked around at them with a leisurely gaze, as if familiar with it all, then lit up upon seeing Apple-mong and approached.
"Apple-mong. I heard you're the mayor around here these days. I'm busy myself, but you said it was so much fun that I came."
"Yeah, yeah, glad you came. Come over here first—I'll teach you the settings and basic controls."
As expected of the networking king Apple-mong.
She was using her connections to send recommendation letters all over the place.
There was a reason people said Apple-mong was responsible for ninety percent of Rena World's early success.
Not only writing the story herself, but persuading big-name streamers to move into Rena World.
"Loyalty! Mayor Apple-mong, thank you for your hard work today as well!"
"Hey hey, Seo-a. Sometimes you scare me. On Purge Day you showed no mercy and sliced people up with a diamond sword."
"Sometimes I scare myself too. Without even realizing it, I have a second personality that suddenly does such cruel things…"
"Kekeke! Really? So you've got a black flame dragon sleeping in your left hand or something?"
Apple-mong had a no-grudges, cheerful personality, so I was casually building a friendship with her.
With solid connections and skills, an honest personality, and not much greed, she was the optimal person to get close to if I wanted to.
"What's this, only you two having fun? Introduce me too."
Passing by briefly and chatting with Apple-mong seemed to have caught Dananyang's interest.
"Ah, this friend here is the server's top dog. You should stay on her good side too."
"What? Top dog? There's something like that?"
"I'm serious. Seo-a, try typing in the global chat once."
"Ahem! Shall I show you then?"
Having a title attached really made the aggro top-tier.
The server's global chat erupted with fiery reactions.
Confirming it, Apple-mong laughed so hard she clutched her stomach.
"Puhahaha! Seo-a, I love how you just go for it without holding back."
"Wow, so you were someone amazing. Let's get along."
"Aigoo! The pleasure's all mine. Looking forward to working with you, seonbae-nim."
"Huh? Why am I seonbae?"
"You're a partner streamer, aren't you? I'll become a partner streamer someday too, so that makes you my seonbae."
"Puhat! Apple-mong, this one's really fun. Amazing, amazing!"
Mist was the type to cause trouble and vanish soon enough, but Dananyang would stick around for a long time and had excellent connections, so I needed to leave a good impression.
Especially since Dananyang was part of the golden line that led straight to Park Bong-sik.
In fact, she would later become a member of the company Park Bong-sik founded after entering Rena World—Mu-yang Group.
Hm? Calculating even these minor connections—isn't that a bit much?
That's just how life works, kids.
And so I was, once again sacrificing myself for the stream, going hard today too.