Crew
Monday, November 7th.
The moment Freeca was formed, Ssa-yo hit the ground running.
He got the fan café and YouTube channel fully operational, locked down the internal guidelines, and poured every ounce of effort into smooth communication with Pangea TV so that even the smallest support measures could roll out as fast as possible.
Watching all of that, I felt a genuine sense of crisis.
Huh? I'd cut a deal so Lucy and I could step off safely — but this was turning out stronger than I'd expected.
People who'd been deep into the community's mask-play games back in the day, and even the virtual streamers themselves, used to say things like this: if Freeca succeeded and got famous, the virtual pie on Pangea TV would grow bigger and new viewers would flood in. So everyone should cheer them on.
Hmm. Was that really how it worked?
From my perspective — having seen the future all the way to 2025 — it was the opposite.
The virtual pie had a ceiling. Internet broadcasting was already a niche field to begin with, and virtual streamers sat at the very fringe of that niche. How much of the main stage could they realistically claim?
Ah — if YouTube brought in a serious new audience, the story might change. But no virtual streamer ever managed that kind of YouTube success in the end.
Ultimately, the virtual scene was just a fight over slices of the same pie. If anything, poaching human streamers' audiences on the same platform was more realistic than conquering YouTube.
After Rena World, massive content servers had appeared one after another, and a lot of human streamers' viewers had migrated over to virtual broadcasts.
The streaming scene is tiny to begin with. Even if the virtual pie grows, how big can it really get? In the end, it's infinite competition inside a narrow market.
Which meant that the better Freeca did, the more other virtual streamers would take indirect damage. The only reason the damage wasn't immediate was that Freeca had set its sights on YouTube — but if Ssa-yo suddenly changed strategy, things could get ugly fast.
There's only one answer. Freeca isn't the only crew quietly getting bigger. To deal with them, we need a crew of our own.
Looks like I need to move the plan up a bit.
After the Wooga-dol audition ended, the Pangea TV virtual scene looked like the warlord era of the Three Kingdoms.
The transfer virtual streamers who'd failed the audition — their original goal — were now flailing around, trying to figure out what came next. Some chose to go back to Rabbit TV. The rest threw themselves into solo streaming, determined to survive somehow.
Ah — plenty of them also clung to V-topia's lifeline. But V-topia prioritized candidates by upvote ranking on the application board, so for obscure small-time streamers with no name recognition, that rope was forever out of reach.
In the end, the small-timers had no choice but to band together and scrape for survival among themselves.
And right at that moment, a small-time virtual streamer rose like a comet.
The star of the show: Ddoonnyang.
A textbook case of a second-round Wooga-dol dropout. But what she did afterward was genuinely stunning.
The Wooga-dol audition had been full of constraints because of the idol concept, she declared — and now she was throwing off that mask to show her real self. She aggressively recruited a few fellow dropouts and launched a drinking mukbang series.
The spicy aggro pulled in a solid crowd of casual viewers, and she showed off such dazzling banter that she shot to the top of the virtual buzz charts overnight. Every time she went live, nearly a thousand casual viewers piled in. Among all the Wooga-dol rejects, she was easily ranked the best output.
"I should start putting a crew together too, huh? Looking around, everyone's got one."
Right now, the most overwhelming momentum belonged to Freeca, no question. Through the Wooga-dol audition they'd built a solid fandom, and they had a reliable mid-tier veteran in Ssa-yo backing them up. Official sponsorship from Pangea TV carried real weight, too.
And right on their heels was Rena Universe. This one had already achieved economies of scale — an overwhelming number of virtual streamers under the crew banner. Just the official fan café membership, carried over from Rabbit TV, had blown past ten thousand. Pure size-wise, even Freeca couldn't compete.
But the downsides were just as clear. Too many members made fine-grained management impossible, and scandals and accidents never stopped. In particular, the friction between Rena-ttang and Yume — the crew's biggest star after the move to Pangea TV — was starting to shake Rena Universe to its foundations.
Third place: V-topia. Run by Yu Seona, a mid-tier veteran on par with Ssa-yo, and backed by the virtual company Melissa. With application numbers through the roof, post-Wooga-dol buzz in the virtual scene was concentrating hard in their direction.
Suffocating. Absolutely suffocating. With aggro being pulled from every direction like this, how are the small-timers buried at the bottom supposed to survive?
Even Ddoonnyang was running around declaring she'd make a crew. To build a crew you needed buzz — and at this point, the competition was brutal.
But if I wait any longer, I'm screwed. In a few days it'll be even harder than it is now.
The final-round dropouts from the Wooga-dol audition would band together and form a crew of their own. Among all the virtual crews that appeared after the 720p crisis, that one would deliver the strongest short-term impact by far — and even after it disbanded, it would leave a massive footprint on the Pangea TV virtual scene. Thinking about them, I needed to seize the issue at least a day earlier.
Thankfully, I'm not starting from absolute zero.
During Friday's stock-trading stream, I'd dropped some bait about a crew. And today, Pangea TV's stock price had jumped six percent, pulling community aggro my way. The stock would keep climbing for the next few days, which would help keep the buzz alive.
So right now was the moment. While people's attention was still pointed at me, I had to make my move.
The only question was how.
Just gathering everyone and announcing, "We're a crew starting now" — that's way too bland.
A streamer should be able to find a broadcast angle in any situation. Crew formation was no exception.
Without hesitation, I uploaded the announcement I'd planned out in advance to my channel.
Pangea TV's major shareholder (233 shares)
Pangea TV's first pure-blood virtual streamer
Holder of Pangea TV's highest virtual stream viewership record
Pangea TV's flagship virtual streamer, Seo-a
is recruiting crew members
to warm up together in a true fam'ily' atmosphere.
Applications close at 09:00 AM on the 8th.
A short interview and talent showcase will be held,
so come prepared and figure it out yourselves.
Even if you don't make the cut, it's a great chance
to show off your charm in front of the audience.
Looking forward to lots of applications. Thank you.
I quietly logged into my alt and cross-posted the announcement to FM Community as a "repost." Comments sprouted up like weeds.
The reaction was scorching. More than anything, people loved that it wasn't just a crew launch announcement — it was content: recruiting members through an interview.
Pangea TV viewers go absolutely feral for interviews and meetings. No way I was leaving that golden content on the table.
There was a reason terms like "interview addict" and "meeting addict" existed. On a platform as old as Pangea TV, this was already a proven hit format.
After watching the community pulse for a bit, I messaged the two people already locked in.
"Just posted the announcement. Drop a comment when the timing feels right. Don't wait too long."
"Okay. Already saw it. Then Lucy, you apply first? I'll apply about an hour later."
"Yeah. I'll do that, Miho unnie."
Ever since our last conversation had sealed the crew arrangement, Lucy had started speaking up to Miho. True to form for a thorough gentleman who never slipped when addressing her seniors.
Miho, though, kept talking down to her while stubbornly refusing to reveal her own age to the end.
……Which only made me more curious. She said she was older than twenty-four-year-old Lucy, at least.
We spent the rest of the time talking through tomorrow's crew recruitment interview content. Since I was planning to pick those two, I needed everything prepped so no ugly comments would surface.
Then a thought suddenly hit me.
What if some streamer I never saw coming applies?
That crew still hadn't formed yet, so it was possible.
Thump, thump — my heart started racing.
Broadcasting really was pure dopamine.
I couldn't wait for tomorrow.