Games blow up in the strangest ways nowadays. A single stream from a BTS member can rocket an Among Us-like to Among Us-grade virality. Likewise, as the already massive Deep Rock Galactic community recently learned, a big vtuber joining the ranks of the space dwarves may indeed bring all the weebs to the yard. Happily, this group of stout miners has welcomed these new, anime girl-watching greenbeards with open arms.
This all started a few days ago when Shishiro Botan, a vtuber under Hololive with nearly 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube, streamed Deep Rock Galactic for about two hours to upwards of 10,000 viewers, ending the stream with a positive appraisal of the game. The VOD for this stream is sitting at 160,000 views at the time of writing, so there's no doubt it put a lot of eyes on the game – and not just in Japan and broader Asia, where Hololive is generally biggest, since Botan clearly has a non-trivial Western audience too.
Let's be perfectly clear: Deep Rock Galactic has been out for a few years and amassed over 140,000 Steam reviews with a 97% positive rating, to say nothing of its Xbox and Game Pass release. Realistically, no amount of Shishiro Botan viewers is going to noticeably change this game's already bright prospects.
That said, as we've seen before – because this is somehow not the first, second, or even third time Hololive has come up in game news – games often circulate around vtuber communities and end up getting the attention of multiple sizable audiences. (Botan apparently picked up DRG after an all-male group within Hololive gave it a shot.) Even so, I'm less interested in the numbers resulting from this situation than I am the DRG community's response, which was genuinely heartwarming.
"Attention brothers and sisters," Redditor and space dwarf OechSenpai said in a PSA. "We have a very huge japanese Hololive streamer Shishiro Botan playing DRG right now. Expect a massive amount of new players."
"Be accepting and welcoming towards new miners, no matter where they come from," a Reddit mod said in a comment on the white-hot post. "Greenbeards joining the ranks should be celebrated. Spend your energy helping a few greenbeards out instead of being grumpy on the internet. The community is a big part of what keeps Deep Rock Galactic great."
Naturally, this inspired some memes and artwork.
in_light_of_recent_news from r/DeepRockGalactic
start working!!!! ⛏️⛏️⛏️⛏️#ししらーと pic.twitter.com/HlGGVrTZpaJanuary 9, 2023
The comments on these posts are a sea of supportive in-jokes which give me hope for humanity. "Rock and stone, Lalion," writes Ax222, marrying the space dwarf battle cry with Botan's apparent tagline. "You mean greenbeards," Natural_Youth_5941 says of the "new players" OechSenpai describes, putting all players on the same level regardless of how many cat-girl vtubers they watch.
"Honestly kinda surprised by the response of this," wrote Twinkiman, neatly summing up my thoughts as well. "I would figure a lot of people would be hating on a group of weebs joining this game. The more players the better!"
Deep Rock Galactic is one of the best co-op games you can play today – hit that link for 24 others.
