Talk:Haruno Sora/@comment-4946341-20181005105151/@comment-31616896-20181019143942

I'm surprised she's doing as badly as she is myself, I really love her design and I like her voice, and with her coming out on a new engine right from the start, I had hope that she'd take off. But I think you're right -- too much competition in a wide but shallow market. There's only so many people using VOCALOID in this day and age, and with the price of the V5s, it makes sense that people would just use one of the defaults, or even use a vocal they may already have, or one that already has a built-in following. I'm not a producer so please correct me if I'm mistaken, but it also feels like there hasn't been that much changed between V5 and v4, in comparison to the differences that V4 brought over V3.

I want her to take off, but... I don't know that she will unless someone with a really big name makes a smash hit with her.

I feel as if Vocaloid peaked in V3 -- not in terms of quality, but in terms of widespread appeal. V4 saw a halcyon swing with IA's popularity, but right now, things feel as though they are on a decline. Miku will probably be popular for a long time yet with her status as the face of the genre, but for the rest of the voicebanks out there... it's hard to say. A lot fewer voicebanks are getting updated these days, and as the version numbers get further apart, use goes down. A lot of my favorite vocals are ones that were barely used even in their era (MERLI and CUL come to mind,) and given that even popular ones like Utatane Piko and the entire V1 generation never got updates, it's likely that over time, only a smaller number of voicebanks will be released because an even smaller number of themw ill see widespread use. Maybe that's for the best -- hopefully more quality over quantity -- but it's also very sad.

There were so many vociebanks that I thought were shoe-ins for popularity when they came out, LUMI and Sora in particular. I can only hope that things pick up again in 2019.