Vtubers Are Crashing The Game Awards Party
The Game Awards 2025 Content Creator of the Year category looks a little different this time. Alongside big names like Kai Cenat and MoistCr1tikal, there are two nominees who are not traditional on camera streamers at all. One is the chaotic Arc Raiders personality TheBurntPeanut. The other is a pink haired anime girl that a lot of western viewers might not recognize yet.
Her name is Sakura Miko. She is one of the biggest Japanese vtubers on YouTube, with more than 2.4 million subscribers and seven years of streaming history behind her. If you mostly watch English streamers, you might have seen clips of her popping off in games like Rust or Ark without even realizing who she is.
Seeing Miko on the same list as massive human faced creators is not just a fun surprise. It is a sign of how far vtubers have come in a pretty short time.
Who Is Sakura Miko And What Is Hololive
Sakura Miko is part of Hololive, a vtuber agency that has quietly become a giant in online entertainment. If you have ever seen a random anime avatar yelling about Minecraft, losing their mind in a horror game, or wiping to a FromSoftware boss on your feed, there is a good chance it was a Hololive member.
Hololive is the same group that represents Usada Pekora, another wildly popular vtuber who was nominated for Content Creator of the Year in a previous Game Awards. Pekora even has a cameo in Death Stranding 2, which tells you how seriously big game studios now take this kind of virtual personality.
Over the last few years Hololive has basically become the default vtuber brand worldwide. They have talent across multiple languages, but their Japanese roster, which includes Miko, is still their core. For a long time this meant they were a bit hidden behind a language wall for western viewers. That is starting to change.
Matoaki Tanigo, CEO of Cover, the company behind Hololive, is not surprised to see Miko up for an award. For him, this nomination proves that vtubers are finally being seen less as a weird niche and more as normal streamers who simply happen to use 2D or 3D avatars instead of webcams.
He does admit that Miko has tough competition. Most of the people voting at The Game Awards are English speakers, and Miko streams primarily in Japanese. But Tanigo has a pretty simple wish for them. He hopes voters will at least check out one stream or a few clips before they decide.
Clips, Fan Translations, And The Growth Of Vtubers
If you are wondering how a Japanese speaking streamer can build a global fanbase, the answer is clips. Short clips are basically the front door to vtuber fandom.
Once you watch one good Miko clip on YouTube, the algorithm will happily drown you in more. Behind those clips is a huge community of fans called clippers. They rewatch long streams, chop them into the funniest or most emotional moments, add subtitles, and upload them as bite size videos that anyone can understand.
Some fans even translate live in the chat during streams, helping new viewers keep up with what is going on. But in a lot of cases, you do not even need to understand the words. Watching someone get completely destroyed in a FromSoftware boss fight is universal content.
This clipping culture has helped turn vtubers from a Japanese curiosity into a global phenomenon. It is also what makes nominations like Miko’s possible. You do not need to sit through a three hour Japanese stream to get why so many people love her. Two or three clips can do the job.
On top of that, Cover has just made a new deal with Twitch to get more of its vtubers streaming on the platform regularly. English speaking vtubers such as Ironmouse already pull in viewer numbers that rival or beat the biggest traditional streamers. The pipeline from niche anime avatar to mainstream creator is more open than it has ever been.
Do Vtubers Need Their Own Awards
With vtubers everywhere, it might seem natural to spin up vtuber only awards or even an entire show just for them. Tanigo does not think that is the right move.
In his view, if vtubers want to be truly established worldwide, they should show up in general creator awards more often instead of being boxed into a separate category. Being nominated next to people like Kai Cenat or MoistCr1tikal sends a stronger message than winning a vtuber only trophy that most of the general audience will never hear about.
TheBurntPeanut’s nomination backs up that idea in a different way. He is a vtuber in an extremely loose sense, pushing the boundaries of what a virtual creator can even look like. It proves vtubing is not just about cute anime girls anymore. It can be strange, funny, experimental and everything in between.
At the end of the day, vtubers are just streamers who choose a non traditional way to show themselves on screen. For some it is about anonymity. For others it is about creativity and comedy. For a lot of people, it makes their content more memorable in a sea of similar faces.
Whether Sakura Miko actually wins at The Game Awards on December 11 almost does not matter. Her nomination, together with TheBurntPeanut, is a clear signal that virtual creators are not a side show anymore. They are part of the main event. And if current trends keep going, the Game Awards nominees list will probably feature more avatars and fewer typical webcams every year from now on.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/the-game-awards-nominated-another-hololive-vtuber-and-her-boss-just-wants-voters-to-give-her-a-chance-i-would-hope-that-they-watch-her-stream-at-least-once/
