Events for Christmas
Whoa! So our crew members went and planned a surprise event behind their leader's back, all for Christmas.
I was genuinely touched.
I wasn't being sarcastic—they really had done something admirable. I'd thought of them as nothing but beginner streamers, but somewhere along the way they'd grown a lot. It felt like watching my little daughters, thriving and blossoming on stream, put on a little talent show just for me.
Ahem. Still, a "hidden camera" bit is never pure fun for the person on the receiving end. The whole premise of the content is that you get fooled. So I made a quiet resolution to myself.
I was going to work all three of them twice as hard.
If they had the free time to cook up a hidden-camera prank, that meant they had energy to spare. Still, the surface had to look warm and fuzzy. I put on a gentle smile and spoke to Mayo.
"Our Mayo must have worked so hard. There, there. Once the collab's over today, rest up properly and play a few solo queues, okay?"
"Huk! Seo-a unnie's mouth is smiling, but her eyes are looking at Mayo all cold, it is so. Mayo is so scared, it is so."
"Oh, come on, Mayo. What are you even saying?"
My avatar stepped over to Mayo's, casually slung an arm around her shoulders, and whispered low.
"Hey. Smile. Big and bright."
"Ahaha… it's so fun, it is so."
And just like that, V-Live's Christmas special collab settled back into a warm, cheerful mood. We were only at the opening, with a long road still ahead—so why did it already feel like we'd burned through all our energy? Probably just my imagination.
"Well then, shall we start the events we prepared for today? First up is the fan cafe event—the so-called Christmas Contest! We posted the notice two weeks ago, and we're truly grateful so many of you entered."
It had a grand name—Christmas Contest—but it was the kind of event you saw all the time in the streaming scene. Fan art, fan videos, fan songs—no restrictions on the format. Anything that let fans show their love for Christmas was fair game. Over those two weeks we'd taken submissions through the fan cafe, and we'd prepared a pile of prizes for the fans who'd put in the work.
"Miho unnie, would you announce the prizes?"
"Okay! We've got some seriously stacked prizes ready. First, the Effort Award! We'll pick five people total, and those folks get a chicken gift coupon. Next, the Mayo Award! Exactly what it sounds like—if Mayo picks you, you get a chicken gift coupon as the base, plus Mayo's Christmas Bang-sel on top!"
The Miho Award, Lucy Award, and Seo-a Award worked the same way. Chicken gift coupons paired with each member's Bang-sel—mouthwatering enough that more than a few hardcore fans had been staking their lives on the contest since the notice dropped two weeks ago.
And then the crowning prize: the V-Live Crew Award. That one had our crew's very first group Bang-sel on the line.
It's true that we should prioritize the hardcore fans who throw a lot of Candy. Without their donations, streaming itself gets hard. But every now and then, you need prizes you can't buy with donations alone.
For a stream to thrive, you needed more than Candy donations. You needed the active chatters who greases the wheels so a streamer can keep the broadcast flowing. You needed the golden-handed fans who tribute illustrations that delight the audience's eyes, and the technical people who help with videos and all kinds of other work. The crew around WooWakGood—one of Rabbit TV's big-corp streamers—was famous for having that system dialed in beautifully.
So sometimes you had to show those talents a little care, too. Personally, if I gave hardcore fans a five on the consideration scale, these talents got about a two or three. The rest went to the regular fans. Public sentiment was always something you had to watch.
Events like this were perfect for rallying the hardcore fans. Gatekeeping, at its core, starts with shutting outsiders out and blabbing about inside jokes only your circle knows. It's a kind of superiority complex—we're longtime V-Live fans, and we know intimate stories you floaters never will. The flip side is that it can produce negative effects, too. Once a stream stagnates into still water, it starts to rot. You need casual viewers constantly flowing in and out to keep the water clean—but sometimes the hardcore fans' gatekeeping becomes a wall against new blood.
So you needed a two-track strategy: take care of the hardcore fans while also soothing the casuals so they didn't feel left out. How? Simple. Invest a little more—time, money, whatever it took.
"That wraps up the fan cafe contest. From here on, it's time for our invited guests. Cold winter, forever alone, no romance—how lonely and bored must you be on a Christmas like today? Don't worry. Even if you're a shut-in forever-alone nerd rotting in your room, the V-Live crew will always be by your side. From this point forward, it's event time for everyone. Casuals, take your seats and enjoy yourselves."
The casuals, whipped into a frenzy by the provocative lines, started thrashing around in chat. I pulled out the feed at just the right moment.
"Starting now—ten minutes of Boost Time! Type anything in chat, and if a crew member picks you, you get a Boost (30-day) item as a gift. Ready, se-e-et, go!"
MihoLoveYoonjin has been forcibly removed.
"Ah, what the hell! Is this person insane for real."
"But looking at the nickname, they seem like your hardcore fan, unnie."
"What are you talking about. That's a total psycho."
Once prizes were on the line, the cheerful drips and chat flooded without end. Yeah—this was how you got the casuals to have fun. And someday, today's good memories would become the reason those casuals turned into hardcore fans of the V-Live crew.
"Next prize is chicken gift coupons. We'll pick five total. Ready, se-e-et, go!"
From Boosts to chicken to pizza, we fired off prizes without holding back. Word must have spread through the communities, because the viewer count that had been creeping up bit by bit suddenly blew past two thousand. Pulling that off on a night when every house was running a packed Christmas special stream was a real achievement, and I was thoroughly satisfied.
Sure, we hit twelve thousand just yesterday, so two thousand might look small by comparison.
But viewer numbers racked up from the lowest-quality "hell-tier" casuals and viewers drawn in by pure content were never even in the same category. Comparing ourselves to the other crews only made the joy bigger. Pocotin had eight hundred, Decrescendo twelve hundred, Freeca fifteen hundred… and shockingly, we were in first place.
Yesterday's aggro really must have been huge.
It seemed like more casuals had flowed in from the Mist incident than I'd expected. Casuals were illusions at the base level, but converting them into hardcore fans was one of a streamer's most important skills. The ones who could do it kept growing; the ones who couldn't stayed small-time forever. Either way, the timing was undeniably good. We were about to unveil the Christmas carol video we'd prepared in front of over two thousand viewers.
"Alright, then—time for today's highlight. You've all been waiting for this, right? Christmas without carols just isn't Christmas! So we really put our hearts into preparing this. We may not sing like pros, but we did our absolute best, hoping you'd like it."
Every other crew's carol video had already dropped. Freeca had claimed they were focusing on YouTube, then put out something that got dismissed as not living up to the hype. Pocotin, buried under one disaster after another, wasn't even getting proper reviews—just a flood of dislike terrorism. Decrescendo had drawn every eye and every expectation, only to leave people wishing it hadn't been so ordinary, or that more parts had gone to their song pick.
And in that climate, the unspoken gazes pouring onto our crew—were they closer to goodwill, or malice?
"Then we'll reveal it. Lucy unnie."
"Okay."
Since it wasn't my stream, Lucy had to handle all the manual operations herself.
"Mayo's getting nervous, it is so."
"Shh! It's starting."
It wasn't just the viewers who were full of anticipation. Even while drowning in Minecraft chaos, we'd constantly dashed over to the VRChat map and poured everything into the shoot. I could say it with certainty: we had thrown more into this than anyone.
How could I be so sure? It was obvious just looking. Whatever the other crews had invested, our crew—myself included—had dumped in at least twice that. Call it capitalist arithmetic. If you asked why we'd gone that far, part of it was definitely what I'd mentioned before: we wanted to finish the year with dignity. This year would be the last for the scariest rival that had been crushing us. If we were going to teabag them, we at least had to stamp one win into the record before they disappeared.
Come to think of it, the song we chose has a pretty meaningful title, too.
The darkened video screen slowly brightened. On a pure white snowfield, the four of us appeared. Below us, the song's title drifted past.
Last Christmas
A carol holding the all-time record for the most album sales worldwide. Maybe it suited Decrescendo even better than us. For them, this Christmas really was the last one.
With Mayo's bright, cheerful voice, the song began.