Talk:Utatane Piko (VOCALOID2)/@comment-35874478-20180809233005/@comment-53539-20180810081901

I think as a Engloid fan my biggest peeve is just in the last couple of years I've constantly seen "Bring back Piko" and not once has any of the 8 lost English vocals been asked for an update, the exception being Miriam. If people were fairly asking for all 8 I know I'd feel better about the constant demand.

But the biggest issue is no one bought Piko back in 2010-2011 and that means more or less Piko got far less chance of being updated. The first year of a Vocaloids life is the most important of them all and Piko didn't do too well. Sony also has their own vocal synth now so is less likely to consider updates. A lot of things are that things are simply too little too late, plus knowing no one bought him in the day... Well, kinda means that Sony likely has low expectations.

I always bring up the classic case once reported by Nintendo on how they receive demands from fans a lot for new games based on old characters or franchises, etc, and how Nintendo reported it ignores them and does its own thing. Its because they know if they made X product exist, a lot fo fans aren't actually going to buy it and they just want it to exist. This seems okay but Nintendo is a company that needs to make money, you simply don't have room to invest in products nobody will buy when you have investors and share holders and such to keep happy. There just isn't room for this. Even if Piko updates, you may buy him, but bare in mind your not the intended target audience, since Piko is Japanese and meant for the Japanese market they don't expect many overseas to buy Vocaloids at all. So their not interested in sales from abroad. Intended market does play a role in products, I remember back in the day Nickelodeon canning Ahhhh! Real Monsters because the main audience watching it were adult females instead of children. Saying that, MLP benefitted greatly from "Bronies" watching the show. So this can work out for better or worst. Even when CFM made English voicebank, it was known they'd made them for Japanese vocaloid producers to break into the west. Not... So English speakers had access to Miku. So Sony seeing a few hundred English speakers buying Piko may not even make them bat an eye lash (especially since a few hundred wouldn't be enough to meet expected sales anyway).

All of this paints a gloomy picture of the reality Piko and other such vocaloids face. So far the biggest update of interest was just Tone Rion, despite just being "+gwl" update they did update her even if it was to record Nemu under the new recording technique that was brought in with V4. Tone Rion being barely used compared to many other V3s made it notable. So underog updates can happen. We don't really know fully how all the Vocaloids are doing either, as noted often about Avanna she had about 30 images on DeviantArt and didn't have much more in terms of Songs on places like youtube, compared to Prima, Big Al, Oliver or even shubby built Sonika. Yet apparently copies of her were selling like hotcakes. So Piko's lack of presence may not be as bad as it seems. But... Normally when it comes to Japan, its quite a tell-tale of whats going on overall. So I would keep expectations low, Vocaloids tend to struggle at times to make ends meet at times. :-/

I think myself at the end of the day the problem is this; there are 50 or so Japanese vocaloids, Piko is male, there are 100 or so Japanese voicebanks and Sony has its own vocal synth now. The outlook is grim, but consider that right at the start I mentioned the English vocaloids for a reason. And that reason is loosing Piko isn't such a big deal when you put it in perspective. As I noted, when V3 retires the situation will be much, much worst, but at the same time consider Japanese Vocaloid only took 1 hit in V2 compared to English Vocaloid. Retiring V2 caused half the library of available English vocals to disappear overnight.