I completely missed the chatter about this entity being an NFT outfit in the past somehow, and man that's unfortunate. Re-contextualizes so much of what has been said in a not so good way that is pretty copacetic with the idea of "a grift". In fairness, the public perception surrounding NFTs was wildly differently handled in JP spaces as compared to EN spaces as of a few years ago, but given the context of GONZO's involvement, and the fact that we exist in Current Year, 2024, I suspect that financial incentive is still probably a major undercurrent here.
My opinion on the "why would they chose to publicly single out professionals" is that this seems to be a separate clause from the VB development alone. The character design itself aligns closely IMO with what late gen-z and gen-a are into as far as character designs at this time, so my instinct says that the vocals themselves are still very much trying to target fans. They say they are trying to position themselves as a label as well as a developer, so I suspect the label side of this business is what the interest in professionals comes from-- an attempt to generate the kind of business where income and collaboration is legitimized by hanging out with corporate types. This isn't an announcement of just a VB, but instead an apparently very ambitious startup business attempting to generate interest in all its parts, which is pretty much new.
A very weird announcement for sure. I am really curious how this group's contact with the SynthV news account/note profile came to be. If it was solely this group's effort alone, that seems to imply some serious surveying of the english-speaking side of this community's Twitter, which is interesting.
