Hey there ! I’m a freelance game marketing manager. I’m also a fan of Hearthstone. I’ve played the game a few hours daily for the last two years. Lately I’ve been fond of game influencers analysis and I want to make a case study of my favorite one, Kripparrian.

If you don’t know anything about Hearthstone and its game mechanics, check out Wikipedia.

Who is Kripparrian?

Kripparrian (also called Kripp) is an Canadian game caster. He started game casting in 2009 with World of Warcraft. He was part of one of the best WoW team and was known for his raids. He explained his knowledge through Youtube tutorials.

In February 2012, he is the first to complete the Iron Man Challenge on WoW (video). It means he got to the maximum level (85 at the time) without dying even once.

When Diablo 3 came out, he specialized in this game and was one of the best hardcore players. Hardcore is the game mode of Diablo 3 where your character, killed once, is dead forever. In June 2012, he became famous for streaming the first Inferno Diablo Hardcore Kill on Twitch.

He also played Path of Exile and was one of the best in the Hardcore race series. I gathered those information from TeamLiquid’s wiki.

His logo, probably taken from Diablo 3. He’s still using it though.

_____________Content strategy______________________

Specialized in arena & deck building

Arena allows you to make innovation on deck building through semi-randomized picks. This game mode is really fun for deck builders who want a new experience on every arena run. He regularly goes 12–X in his arena, meaning that he won a complete streak. Many Arena players in Hearthstone like his videos for his advices & insights on Arena.

He also tried to break the ranked game meta sometimes by making brand new decks and combinations. I remind one of the videos where Kripp says that it’s just what he enjoys to do. He likes building new decks out of nowhere to see how it turns out. 3/4 of them aren’t good decks for ladders. But he’s good at showing his enthusiasm about new awkward play styles.

Something I can’t even reach

Excellency is key

While fetching his previous video, I could understand that Kripparrian has always aimed to be one of the very best. He made a video about how to be server first level 90 solo on Diablo and did a lot of tutorial. Kripp is highly interested in mastering games and often try to provide his expert insights. He’s less inclined toward fun experiments but will try to break the meta with a new archetype once in a while.

Watching his previous videos, I could see that he has less fun in competition than before. Being good on a competitive level takes a lot of time. His channels also takes him a lot of time, while being his main sources of income.

Consistency

Kripp is a very complete game caster. At this time, March 2017, Kripp has 900k youtubers subscribers and 950k twitchers subscribers. It’s really hard and lengthy for a game caster to maintain both those platforms. Youtube and Twitch don’t work the same way, but Kripp found a very good combination.

He uses Twitch as a content base for his Youtube video, and does this daily, even when there’s special events going on. His regularity is very appreciated by his audience. His Youtube highlights are really great to catch up on his daily achievements or innovations.

Twitch — Continuous plays

His first twitch stream was in April 2012. As said previously, he tends to play a lot of long hours on Stream, then pack it in youtube videos. During his streams, he spends a lot of time giving his opinions about Hearthstone decks or news. Kripp’s average daily stream time seems to be around 5 hours.

Sniping is when your opponent watches your stream to look at your cards. With those information, the opponent can beat you easier. As Kripp has around 1 million followers on Twitch, he gets sniped a lot. He rightfully complained about it in a few videos. Now, he tries to hide his username and play on different accounts.

Kripp also gets a lot of trolling on chat. Some people will call lethal when there’s none. As one of the biggest Twitch channel (around 1 million followers), it must be really hard for him to manage the whole chat activity on a daily basis. Edit: Someone told me Kripp doesn’t have any moderators on his Twitch chat.

Youtube — Experiments showcase

Kripp’s content strategy is actually very smart. Every day, he takes some key moments from his Hearthstone experiments and highlights them on Youtube. His experiments usually consist in:

A bold, interesting picks in Arena. Such as making a full random deck.

Some thought about an archetype

Some thoughts about a specific card

A crazy deck he built for fun

An innovative deck he built for ranked mode

To showcase this work he created a well thought structure :

1 to 5 minutes with his thoughts on the experiment.

5 to 15 minutes of play showcasing the experiment.

To show you how he evolved (it only cost him 1 mana)

His first video, for the record

One of his latest video to show you the contrast

His best youtube video is “Diablo Inferno HC World First” and gathered 1.6mo of views.

For someone who has 900k subscribers, it’s not a big record. That’s because Kripp specializes in regularity and live streaming. Outside of Hearthstone, Wow, Diablo & Path of Exile he’s not really famous.

Sponsored videos

Kripparrian did a bunch of sponsored videos on Youtube showcasing other card games. For instance, he covered Faeria and Shadowverse several times. He’s very open about these sponsors and makes a special format for those game discoveries.

Sponsors and partnerships

Kripp has a lot of sponsors on his Twitch channel. He is quite open about his sponsors and it’s probably his main stream of income. He noticeably been a partner of G2A for years.

____________Personality_____________________________

Game Critic

Kripp has often voiced his concerns about certains patterns, cards or mechanics in Hearthstone. He takes the time to really explain about how and why certains things feel really shitty according to him. Sometimes, he also brings evidences on the table with data.

For instance, he made a big deal about “going second on hearthstone”. He’s not scared of voicing his negative and positive opinions about the game.

You could say that Kripp is one of the voices of the hardcore fans of Hearthstone who want to make it better. As he is really skilled and precise in his critics, he’s often read by the Blizzard team. It’s highly probable he met Hearthstone team in person several times and is appreciated by them.

Experiment master

Kripparrian is always creating new deck archetypes in Arena and Ladder. That said, Hearthstone ranked system is not very kind toward experimentation. The reason is that if a new deck archetype is created, a lot of people will start playing it. The game will be stalling pretty fast. There have been a lot of discussion about improving ladder system lately but nothing is really planned right now.

Kripp doesn’t participate in a lot of tournament and is not invested in ranked games. It seems in Hearthstone, he gets a lot of fun with experiments, not competitions. The main reason can be that being competitive on ladder takes a lot of time and requires grinding. Kripp prefers to make content for his audience.

The grain of salt

Like many other pro players in Hearthstone, Kripparrian is very salty. His community even created a meme made of “Never lucky”. He often says that he’s not lucky at all in the game and complains about it. Kripp has many voice patterns and his community like to troll him this way.

This can be one massive arguments against following him. He can sometimes complain in a braggy way. Some people find this behaviour repulsive.

Hey guys, how’s it going, Kripparrian here

A funny thing about Kripp is that he even optimized his youtube presentation. In his 60 latest videos you can see the same pattern. The image with his youtube account. Then he says “Hey guys, how’s it going, Kripparrian here. So today I want to…”.

And actually this has been the case for a very long time, even if it has small variations.

He also made a video about the advantages of… having short hair. “When you game there is just no time for showering”. It’s certainly satirical or a parody though. It’s still not surprising from Kripp to even optimize his haircut.

________________Audience___________________________

Skipperino, Magmarino…

I’ve had tons of fun watching Kripparrian, he’s really funny and interested in the content he’s producing. But his fans who comment his videos are also really creative. They created accounts on Youtube like small personas of Kripparrian.

It’s often made with “persona or hearthstone character name” + kripperino, because that’s fun. For instance you can find “Skipperino Kripperino” who tells you the time of plays, without the analysis. There’s Magma Ragerino… etc.

Kripp’s audience

Kripp built an audience across several 8 years of youtube videos and probably 5 years of Twitch streams. He didn’t master a lot of different games and those tend to be focused on Blizzard.

It’s hard to guess his audience but I’d say it’s pretty mature. My estimate is that those are 25–35 males who love Blizzard games and high skill games.

Social Presence outside Twitch & Youtube

Except for Youtube & Twitch, Kripp is not very active on other social accounts. His Facebook is filled with promotion posts for G2A. His Twitter though has a fairly good activity. He tweets about a lot of different things including his personal life and Hearthstone.

_______________Social performance__________________

His Youtube network is Curse (https://www.unionforgamers.com/)

Twitch data from Gamesight

Twitter — Extract from a personal analysis tool

A low ratio of replies often mean that an influencer doesn’t take the time to interact with his audience. Kripp is streaming a dozen hours a day and publishes 2 videos a day on Youtube. So, that’s understandable.

Twitter — Extract from a personal analysis tool

I’ve extracted stats from other HS players so you can see what’s relevant here.

From my point of view, it reinforces that Kripp’s twitter account could be way more impactful. He has an average performance comparing to DisguisedToast or TrumpSC.

Youtube — Extract from a personal analysis tool

The key stat here is the average views/video. Each of his videos are seen by at least 1/4 of his audience. That’s very good. My tool is not finished so I don’t have other channel stats, but I think it’s pretty high compared to other channels.

Kripparrian made 1600 videos. It’s an average of 16 videos every month from 2009 to 2016. Lately, he makes 2 videos a day on Youtube.

Reddit — https://www.reddit.com/r/nl_Kripparrian/

Kripp has a subreddit with over 6000 subscribers. It’s not highly active but some people seem to have fun in this sub.

On /r/hearthstone, the videos from Kripparrian are often praised and he is the source of a lot of discussions.

Hey guys, how it’s going, Tavrox here. Today I wanted to give you guys a complete overview of Kripperino’s work. Hope you guys enjoyed the blog post!

I’m making a game called Neurodeck! Check out the steampage!