The Fish I've Hooked
Roughly two months had passed since the virtual scene on Pangea TV first took shape.
It still couldn't be said to have firmly found its footing. One look at the viewer counts in the virtual category after the Wooga-dol audition ended made that clear enough. When Freeca went live riding Ssa-yo's coattails, the numbers were at least passable — but outside those windows, even during prime time the category couldn't punch through the three-thousand-viewer wall. The situation was that dire.
Even the virtual fans couldn't settle on a home base, splitting their attention across other Rabbit TV streams, while the floating top-bar crowd had simply lost interest altogether.
The brutal November virtual slump that settled in after the Wooga-dol audition closed.
(Former) Rena Universe, Decrescendo, Pocotin, and V-Live each put in individual efforts, but even group collab content barely scraped the low-to-mid four-digit range. That was the reality.
The first real crisis to hit the Pangea TV virtual scene.
And then, out of nowhere, Rena World and the Poko Server appeared.
Would these two Minecraft servers become the breakthrough the virtual streamers so desperately needed?
Unfortunately, the Poko Server flopped spectacularly. They didn't just burn money — even their loyal fandoms were shaken, the organizers' incompetence was put on full display, and the Pocotin streamers' images took collateral damage right along with it.
In the end, the only hope left for the virtual fans was Rena World. If this one failed too, a true dark age would descend on Pangea TV's virtual scene. V-Topia was still mid-audition, and Freeca was too busy with internal damage control after the Na-ro-si incident to be of any help.
Perhaps that desperation paid off.
Rena World began a slow, steady climb on the back of the early efforts of the V-Live crew and Apple-mong. Apple-mong's role, in particular, was absolute. She didn't just craft storylines with the small streamers — she leveraged her connections to pull in partner streamers she was close with. Mist, Haisu-ya, Dananyang, Aegyo0, and more. Thanks to that, Rena World finished laying the groundwork for a full-scale boom.
And the spark that lit the fuse was the first major corporate streamer to join the server: Kim Hak-do. That day, the Minecraft category broke fifty thousand viewership, proving it had the potential to approach the mainstream.
The virtual fans rejoiced.
But that joy was soon split cleanly in half.
When crisis hit, everyone had united as one — yet once they cleared it, a thought crept in. Wait a second. Come to think of it, my main streamer never even got into Rena World, did they?
Rena World had originally been prepared for the (former) Rena Universe members and was hastily repurposed, so the server's maximum capacity was never high to begin with. Sixty or seventy people at most?
From there, the landscape naturally divided into viewers of streamers who'd entered Rena World and viewers of those who hadn't. The virtual streamers inside Rena World slowly gained attention and climbed. Conversely, the ones locked out lost even the handful of interest they'd managed to hold onto, sliding into an even worse position.
That was when the internal rift opened among the virtual fans. The virtuals living large inside Rena World versus the starving virtuals outside the server. They began to regard each other with open wariness.
But the latter group had no focal point. Their individual main streamers were mostly small-time to begin with, and there was nothing like Rena World to bind them together. So they quietly latched onto V-Topia. Looking at Yu Seona's ambitious blueprint, it seemed like she'd be stirring up all kinds of things in the virtual scene — wouldn't it pay to get on her good side early?
That was the unstable, chaotic state of the virtual scene when, suddenly, Ssa-yo's announcement for Freeca's additional member audition went up.
For the small virtual streamers walking through darkness, it was nothing short of a ray of light.
What kind of crew was Freeca, after all?
Granted, their standing had dropped considerably from the early days. Right when the crew formed and needed to hit the ground running, the Na-ro-si incident exploded and everything ground to a halt. Every YouTube video they'd uploaded was scrapped, and the work they'd been diligently filming and recording vanished into thin air — they had to strip out all of Na-ro-si's parts, after all. Schedules and planned timelines falling apart went without saying. On top of that, the fandom was in internal chaos, and some viewers peeled off.
While they struggled to patch those internal wounds, how had the world outside changed? The Decrescendo crew made a major leap forward, and Freeca's successful applicants ended up being mocked as people who earned less money than the audition rejects.
Even so, Freeca remained an insurmountable mountain for the small streamers. In a Pangea TV virtual scene overflowing with tiny streamers sporting terrible avatar facials, Freeca's audition winners were equipped with quality gear, and through Ssa-yo's coattails they gained recognition that even landed with major corporate streamers. And that wasn't all. With their own fandom built through the Wooga-dol audition, plus Ssa-yo's fans who showed up for every stream, they were averaging four to five hundred viewers without even running special content.
To small virtual streamers barely hanging on with twenty or thirty viewers, they were beings from another dimension entirely.
And now Freeca was recruiting an additional member. They were only picking one person, so the competition would be beyond imagination — but if you won, you'd be carried off in a flower palanquin. Even while being mocked for falling behind Decrescendo, Freeca members had each pulled in a hundred and fifty thousand candies last month. Apply a regular streamer's conversion rate and that was nearly ten million won. Where else could a woman in her early-to-mid twenties earn that kind of money? And it wasn't a one-off — if you thought about continuously banking that level of income…
The small streamers and their fandoms had their eyes spinning. They had no choice but to apply.
Come to think of it, you didn't even necessarily need to aim for first place. Look at the Decrescendo crew. Even after being eliminated, as popular picks from the audition they were outperforming Freeca, weren't they? Just participating was seizing an opportunity.
Will history flow the same way this time too?
I looked at Ssa-yo's announcement post and cracked a bitter smile.
Freeca's additional member audition. It wasn't on the scale of the Wooga-dol audition, but it was content that did reasonably well. Actually, more famous than the audition's success itself was Ssa-yo's eye for talent. Even during the Wooga-dol audition, he'd shown ghostly insight — discarding popular picks and selecting people who would go on to cause incidents. It was the same with the additional member audition. Because afterward, the winner — Blurbean — would explode with massive controversy and get banned from the platform.
At this point, did Ssa-yo actually have something going on? Maybe he should seriously visit a shaman once…
And the comedy didn't stop with Blurbean's ban. Among the participants eliminated in the process of crowning her were Lee Hana and Amun, who later challenged other external auditions and successfully passed. They became corporate virtuals of an even bigger caliber than Freeca and put on dazzling performances. Yet another case proving that Ssa-yo's eye for talent was the stuff of legend.
"Our Ssa-yo should just focus on his main job."
A guy so good at his actual work — why did he keep scoring own goals like this? It was genuinely pitiful. But despite that sympathy, I had no intention of offering advice for making the right choice. If I did and Freeca's caliber rose higher than before the regression, that would just shrink the virtual pie our crew could claim.
Yeah. Let's just have our Ssa-yo keep making mistakes.
I mercilessly erased Ssa-yo from my mind. Besides, something like Freeca's additional member audition was basically a feast for the virtual streamers who couldn't get into Rena World — and for their viewers. I needed to focus on this side.
I'd already been timing something important since yesterday. What problem? Simple. It was about what to do with Oh Yeong-jun — the streamer I'd first ever collabed with in my broadcasting career.
A fossil of a figure who'd been streaming since 2007. But with various incidents and accidents, and never catching a proper opportunity, he'd been classified as a named small-timer, barely maintaining three-digit viewers. The content that grew this Oh Yeong-jun into a mid-tier streamer was none other than Minecraft. Rena World — the place that let him hit ten thousand viewers for the first time in his broadcasting life, achieve the one-million-candy club, and create the myth of succeeding without any trickle-down from major corporate streamers.
In fact, while Rena World played an enormous role in establishing the Pangea TV virtual scene, the biggest beneficiaries weren't virtuals at all but two human streamers: Oh-ha, who rose from small-timer to mid-tier, and Oh Yeong-jun, who peeled off the named small-timer label for good.
Knowing about those two's success, I'd been diligently building goodwill from early on.
Oh Yeong-jun moved in on the same day as Kim Hak-do, but this is really…
So yesterday I agonized over it considerably. Should I go meet Oh Yeong-jun, or watch a bit longer?
The reason Oh Yeong-jun could write a legendary success story in Rena World was partly his own ability — but you couldn't exclude Muyo's existence. She'd been with him from the start and given him every kind of help. She taught Minecraft complete beginner Oh Yeong-jun everything from A to Z, and thoroughly looked after him when he came in the same day as Kim Hak-do and was left as a loner. Plus the chemistry between the two that clicked beyond imagination. That was why both of them could hit ten thousand viewers without any trickle-down from major corporate streamers.
But what if I intervene from the start and the original history gets twisted?
If I bought Oh Yeong-jun coin at the bottom and the results weren't good, it'd be a pretty big loss. So yesterday I just secretly watched from afar — so that original history would flow as it should.
But I can't keep leaving him alone forever. I need to build goodwill with the Akatsuki fandom, don't I?
Akatsuki — later called the most successful company in Rena World. They wrote a success myth that you could make it even without major corporate streamers. The impact was so big that later, on a large Minecraft server held on Rabbit TV, a group appeared that copied even the concept and the name. If I could build goodwill with that Akatsuki fandom, this would be a truly profitable deal.
Alright. Let's go.
I set out to check on the condition of the fish I'd hooked.