Showdown Mission (2)
V-Live Company — 157,111 VS Funding Bot — 0
Seo-a — 29,458 | Je-yuk-sam-kki — 0
Miho — 25,443
Lucy — 20,554
Mayo — 23,411
Subnitti — 25,816
Han A-yeon — 17,214
Na-ro-si — 15,215
1st — MayoIsBrSilGol 13,000(Mayo)
2nd — DrunkardSubni 10,000(Subnitti)
3rd — GN25Fanboy 10,000(Han A-yeon)
4th — BostonSeo-a 8,500(Seo-a)
5th — Miho'sKidney 7,500(Miho)
Between the advance notice and the carefully stoked atmosphere, nearly 160,000 candies had poured in within twenty minutes of the showdown mission's start.
Compared to Diamond CK, this was a distinctly faster pace.
But measured against the target amount, it was still nowhere near enough.
Was I too impatient? Should I have spent more time winning people over through February, the way the other companies did?
Regret was pointless — the die had already been cast. And it was still far too early to give up.
My own room had produced 29,458 candies. Not a small number. I was currently sitting in first place on the funding board. But everything needed to be evaluated relatively.
As the head of the company, casual viewers had flooded into my stream — ten, twenty times the audience of any of my friends. A huge share of those 29,458 candies belonged to those floaters. Which meant my broadcast still had plenty of untapped capacity.
I'd spilled so much information about the landmark construction funding today that people were clearly convinced the real main event was still ahead. They wanted to hold their donations for that moment, when the spotlight would be brightest.
Ugh. Obsessive fans — a bunch of attention junkies, the lot of them. Aside from BostonSeo-a and Seo-a'sHouseOnFire, everyone else was coyly playing dumb.
The other streams, though — those are impressive.
Audiences of a hundred to two hundred people. And yet they were all keeping pace near the front, which proved their fans were grinding hard so their streamers wouldn't lose face. And the techniques those fans had cooked up from pure cracked-brain soup? Those were the real proof of each streamer's talent.
Honestly, fundraising ability is the single most important skill a streamer can have.
No matter how stacked your other stats are, if you can't pull money, full-time streaming is off the table. You end up a hobby dual-jobber and nothing more. Looking at the current situation, everyone here at least seemed to clear that minimum bar.
More importantly — it's about time…
I could feel the early momentum starting to fade. If I didn't flip the energy soon, the bored floaters would coldly peel off and leave.
"Ahem — I'm going to take temporary control of the regional broadcasts. Everyone, focus up."
Twenty-odd minutes of the opening act. That was long enough. Factor in the Korean national trait of zero patience, and it was time to drop the main course.
"Starting now — V-Live Company members' campaign pledges for the funding! And a full talent showcase! We're going all out. So floater hyungs, don't go anywhere — lock that channel! We start right… noooow!"
Phase two of the funding operation was underway.
There was one thing I'd figured out watching Pangea TV streams before my regression.
Damn. There were a lot of people in this world with money rotting in their pockets. I had no idea how any of them got so rich. Had every overnight crypto-and-stock millionaire from the COVID era just migrated en masse to Pangea TV?
It was a theory with some real weight behind it. Pangea TV's revenue had skyrocketed through the pandemic years, after all.
Either way, the conclusion was the same: the streaming scene had far more big spenders than anyone imagined. And those big spenders were almost always addicted to dopamine and spectacle.
Our company is tiny to begin with. Places with major corporate streamers can coast on raw weight class to some degree, but…
For a company of low-tier streamers banded together like ours, the whole game came down to how many floaters you could lock in. So for a full month, I'd wrung my brain dry building the format we were running now.
Traditional showdown missions always felt like everyone doing their own thing. Individuals grinding for fan donations over a set window, and if someone was lagging, they'd stage a little broadcast WWE to pull in more cash.
There was almost no sense of doing anything together. At best, if someone offered a personal stunt for donations, the rest would raid the stream and toss out a few lines of banter.
Maybe that was just the natural state of things. Showdown mission funding was a stage where 100,000-plus candies changed hands without blinking — an absurd amount of money. And money makes everyone twitchy. One slip of the tongue, one genuine unfiltered moment, and you'd be permanently screenshotted across every community board. So people played it safer than usual.
But we're different. This is the part I focused on hardest from the very beginning.
Lucy, Miho, Mayo, and I were already the same crew. Subnitti and Han A-yeon had been carefully recruited from the company's earliest days with communication as the top priority. And Na-ro-si went without saying — she practically treated me like her broadcasting savior.
Money issues? Sensitive, sure. But the work we'd put in wasn't so light that a raw moment or a bit of stirring would drive wedges between us. So from the start, I'd set out to lay down a big stage.
"We start in order from now. First up is Mayo! Everyone, please raid Mayo's stream."
We'd drawn lots for the order. First up: Mayo.
Every streamer in V-Live Company raided Mayo's broadcast at once. The floaters flipped on multi-view and piled into her channel too. In an instant, Mayo's viewer count rocketed from 220 to 1,300.
I couldn't see them, but I was certain. The big spenders who'd shown up curious about today's landmark construction funding were sitting there right now with their fingers itching to drop candies.
I'd run a small stream myself, but I'd also been a channel chairman once — I knew exactly what that rush felt like. A room full of streamers watching. Chat flying with thousands of messages. And then your massive donation notification detonates across the screen.
In that single moment, you are the star of the broadcast. The streamer freezes in shock. Chat floods with worship for the high roller. For any attention-seeking big spender, a stage this big was simply irresistible.
"Mayo hereby boldly declares it, right here and now, it is so."
Silver hair, blue eyes. A neatly dressed school uniform avatar that was genuinely charming. But ordinary cuteness alone could never explain Mayo.
There it was — the trademark. That thick, gloppy smear of mayonnaise sauce plastered across the right side of her head, impossible to ignore. A completely different avatar from before the regression. Back then she'd been demure and simply cute, without this kind of personality.
Either way, the Mayo who had so thoroughly changed from the past thrust her hand forward and declared with total confidence:
"Mayo will do a 100-candy grotesque food pinball mukbang, it is so!"
Public sentiment was starting to drift a little sideways. But I'd already seen this coming. As a regressor, how could I not have predicted a situation this basic?
I gave a big nod of approval. Mayo caught the signal and shouted even louder, even bolder:
"Mayo is not some shady streamer who just makes noises and secretly throws the food away, it is so! As proof, Mayo will run the grotesque food pinball mukbang with half-cam on, it is so!"
Viewers hyped up by the half-cam grotesque food pinball mukbang started losing their minds. Wait — was the reaction really this strong?
Caught off guard by a response that blew past her expectations, Mayo stammered a bit while explaining the tiered pricing: base menu at 100 candies, with difficulty scaling to 300 and 500. But the already-detonated chat didn't care about any of that — they just screamed at her to start the pinball program already.
"Uh… mala hot pot with mayonnaise is a bit of a difficulty spike, it is so. So I'm pricing that at 500 candies and putting just one of those into the pinball, it is so."
Mayo had been briefly rattled by the explosive reaction, but she quickly recovered and started setting up the pinball with practiced hands. Her funding total shot upward, overtaking me in an instant to claim first place on the board.
A successful launch for phase two of the funding operation.