If you count the peanut with the human eyes and mouth, The Game Awards 2025 has two vtuber nominees for its Content Creator of the Year award. Arc Raiders players may know of TheBurntPeanut, but they may not recognize the pink-haired anime girl pictured next to Kai Cenat and MoistCr1tikal.

Her name is Sakura Miko and she’s one of the most popular Japanese-speaking vtubers on YouTube with over 2.4 million subscribers, and she’s been doing it for seven years. She hasn’t streamed Arc Raiders yet, but there are plenty of clips out there of her playing games like Rust and Ark.

Miko is part of hololive, the same vtuber agency as Usada Pekora, who was nominated for the award last year and who you might recognize from her cameo in Death Stranding 2. Over the past few years, hololive has taken the throne as the biggest vtuber agency in the world. Chances are, if you’ve seen a vtuber clip on social media, it was almost certainly a hololive vtuber.

The CEO of hololive’s parent company COVER, Matoaki Tanigo, isn’t surprised to see another one of the talents he employs in the running.

Tanigo tells PC Gamer he thinks the nomination is a sign of how popular vtubers have become in the last few years, and how they’ve started to be seen as normal streamers who happen to use 2D or 3D avatars. That said, he’s also aware of how tough her competition is, especially with the language barrier for the majority of the voters.

“I would hope that they watch her stream at least once,” he says. “If they don’t understand Japanese, there are many fan-made highlight clips available.”

Indeed, clips are the gateway into vtuber fandom. Watch one and your YouTube recommendations will fill up with them. There’s a whole legion of clippers who cut up streams into bite-sized videos with translations to help you follow along. There are even fans who will provide translations during their live streams in chat. But in my experience, the best clips don’t even need words. Everyone knows what it feels like to be annihilated in a FromSoftware game.

Whether or not Miko wins during The Game Awards on December 11, I bet there will be a lot more vtubers showing up in the nominees list in the future. COVER just struck a deal with Twitch to have several of its vtubers start streaming on the platform more regularly, and vtubers who already stream on it, like Ironmouse, already compete with some of the biggest names on there.

Despite the sheer number of popular vtubers out there—even when they’re not anime girls—Tanigo doesn’t think a vtuber-exclusive award or an entire award show dedicated to vtubers is necessary. “In order for vtubers to become more established globally, I think it would be better if vtubers were selected more often for general creator awards, rather than having an awards show solely for vtubers,” he says.

I don’t think he’s alone in that sentiment now that streamers like TheBurntPeanut are starting to stretch the definition of what a vtuber can be. At the end of the day, they are just streamers who choose to present themselves in a non-traditional way, sometimes purely for the comedic effect. I doubt Miko and TheBurntPeanut’s nominations will be the end of vtubers showing up at The Game Awards, and we’re probably better off for it.

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