Caught: Nijisanji VTubers used bots to inflate their streams

The facade has crumbled for several corporate agencies. In the competitive world of streaming, numbers are absolutely everything, but the community has just discovered that some of those numbers were pure illusion. In mid-March, a famous viewbot service called King Engine was permanently shut down, triggering a domino effect that exposed several VTubers, especially talents from Nijisanji EN, who suffered brutal drops in their live metrics.

The collapse of inflated numbers and the ghost chat

When this fake viewer service ceased operations, forums went wild making comparisons. A fan put together a spreadsheet that spares no one, revealing that the entire English branch of Nijisanji lost around 56% of its average audience from one month to the next. There are painful cases like Finana, who went from averaging 790 views in February to a dismal 260 in March. Other talents suffered collapses exceeding 70%, something that is statistically impossible to justify as a simple "temporary dip in viewership." In fact, fans were already suspicious upon noticing that in streams by talents like Elira, where there were supposedly many people connected, the chat was completely dead and moved slower than a small Twitch channel.

The dark secret to securing better sponsorships

But why risk using bots? Independent creator Dokibird (who knows very well how this industry works from the inside) explained that brands offering sponsorships couldn't care less about subscriber counts or past video views. Advertising agencies look solely at concurrent viewers. If you inflate your streams to simulate having 8,000 people watching you live, you’re going to charge thousands of dollars more to play a mobile game than someone with 400 real viewers.

It is worth noting that talents from other titan agencies like Hololive emerged almost unscathed from this purge, proving that their numbers are indeed organic, while other smaller companies like Phase Connect barely noticed a slight dent in their metrics. The evidence is on the table, and although the talents involved have remained absolutely silent, the trust of their communities is already significantly fractured.

Do you think agencies forced their talents to use bots to inflate numbers, or was it a desperate decision by each individual creator?