If you include the peanut image with human facial features, there will be two virtual anchor (vtuber) nominees for the 2025 TGA "Content Creator of the Year" award.Players of "Arc Raiders" may recognize "The Burnt Peanut", but they may not recognize the pink-haired anime girl alongside Kai Senat and Moist Kritikkar.
Her name is Sakura Miko and she is one of the most popular Japanese virtual anchors on YouTube, with more than 2.4 million subscribers and has been in the industry for seven years.She has not streamed "Arc Raiders" yet, but there are a lot of clips online of her playing games such as "Corrosion" and "Ark: Survival Evolved".
Sakura Miko is affiliated with hololive, the same agency as Usada Pekora, who was nominated for the award last year and also made a cameo appearance in "Death Stranding 2".In the past few years, Hololive has firmly established itself as the world's largest virtual anchor agency - if you have seen clips related to virtual anchors on social media, it is almost certainly from Hololive's artists.
Motoaki Tanigo, CEO of Hololive’s parent company COVER, is not surprised that another of his artists has been nominated.
Tanixiang said in an interview that the nomination marks the surge in popularity of virtual anchors in the past few years, and that they are now gradually regarded as "ordinary anchors who happen to use 2D or 3D avatars."However, he also admitted that the competition faced by Sakura Miko is very fierce, especially because most voters have language barriers.
"I hope everyone will watch her live broadcast at least once," he said. "If you don't understand Japanese, there are many fan-made highlight clips (with translations) online."
Live clip:
Indeed, clips are a stepping stone into a virtual streamer’s fandom—watch them once and your YouTube recommendations bar will be filled with them.There is a group of dedicated editing enthusiasts who will cut the live content into short and concise videos and add translations to make it easier for the audience to understand.Some fans even use barrages to translate in real time during the live broadcast.
Regardless of whether Sakura Miko can win the award at the TGA awards ceremony on December 11, I am sure that more virtual anchors will appear on the nomination list in the future.COVER has just reached a cooperation with Twitch, and many of its virtual anchors will live broadcast on the platform more regularly; and virtual anchors like Ironmouse, who have already settled on Twitch, can already compete with the top anchors on the platform.
Although there are many popular virtual anchors today (not all of them are anime girls), Tanixiang believes that there is no need to set up a "virtual anchor-specific award" or a "virtual anchor-specific award ceremony.""In order for virtual anchors to gain wider recognition on a global scale, I think that instead of holding exclusive awards alone, it is better to have them included in more comprehensive creator awards," he said.
Nowadays, anchors like "TheBurntPeanut" are expanding the definition of virtual anchors, and Gu Xiang must not be the only one who holds this view.Ultimately, they're just streamers who choose to present themselves in unconventional ways - sometimes purely for comedic effect.I believe that the nominations of Sakura Miko and "TheBurntPeanut" will never be the end of virtual anchors' appearance in TGA, and this may be a good thing for us.
