Talk:SeeU/@comment-28951715-20180926172945/@comment-53539-20180926194116

Its basically because she has lost a lot of popularity and while she sold out on limited editions, the actual main product isn't doing too great. The biggest factor is her provider went to jail and as far as things go that had an impact on SeeU. This pretty much signalled the death of SeeU English. We did hear that SeeU had sold better in Japan, despite political discrimination, but she still didn't do well. Its the same situation as with Tiyani, while SeeU is popular there is a lot of pirating going on and not many producers have the legit version.

There is also this notion that by now were should be on Korean Vocaloid no.5... But her company pushed SeeU so much they didn't make anymore, so SeeU had nobody to lean on and they didn't offer much variety to their fanbase of producers to help build up a market. Basically if Uni hadn't appeared supported by a second party, the Korean Vocaloids would be just as dead as Spanish ones.

Either way, the Korean Vocaloid fans just weren't enough.

Some of those other Vocaloids have variations of issues you listed. Cul has a difficult vocal to work with due to how solid it was, Mew was a professional vocal so was a niche market, Lapis actually did exceptionally well and was available across multiple mediums, but her company has not done anything since Merli. Arsloid was male and males don't sell well. Anon/Kanon were two vocals of much the same as producers had been given so had trouble standing out. Plus came late engine. Same problem was with Chika.

One of the things to consider was V4 was not much of an improvement over V3 so some of the companies just didn't bother updating their full registry of characters. So not all of the characters you listed updated because of this reason. In V4 XSY opened the gates for Vocaloids like Cul to find usefulness as support products - V5 has now taken that away. Vocaloids aren't expected to sell heaps of copies and are a niche product, they have to merely meet X amount of units to be declared successful. V3 offered a lot of vocaloids which ended up sounding too alike so by the end the generation got a bit tiring and few vocals stood out. and vocals now are under much more pressure then they were before.

However, since 2014 Vocal synths aren't as popular overall as they used to be and this is hitting not only every new Vocaloid coming out, but Vocaloid itself. AsI said elsewhere the biggest one to take a hit was UTAU at 60% while Vocaloid saw in one year a drop of 40%. CeVIO is now becoming a rival to Vocaloid and Voiceroid, thats cheaper at the price of sounding slightly worst. Vocaloid is no longer as dominate in the market and no longer crazy popular.

While "SeeU is dead" is a bit exaggerated, it does refer to the way things are. Vocaloids have to make their biggest impact in their second year, they rarely sell well in their second or third. To ask several years later when SeeU is done and dusted and her first year is long over to be anything else then she was is a few too many years too late. In short by this point there isn't going to be expected to be much interest in SeeU anyway. Fans tend to over exaggerate things I've noticed (Galaco prize version retirement) but I wouldn't say she is alive and kicking.

In comparison, we know the Chinese Vocaloids are alive and kicking but we know their overall getting by as the number of them has grown. Despite the report of very few producers having legit copies, we can see semi-success and success stories occurring by watching popular trends among Vocaloid.