4 personas of Youtube video game influencers
I’ve been doing game marketing influencers for around a year. I’ve watched more than 200 Youtube channels and learned about video game influencers. On Youtube, you have to showcase this personality and gather an audience that loves it.
I’ll explain how Youtuber play games, their friendliness with game review and their typical audience. Categorizing them is a technical necessity, considering the number of Youtuber there is, in order to be able to understand the different ways to cast gaming on Youtube — but keep in mind they are characters — real people are unique.
- The Passionate Master
- The Friendly Discoverer
- The Heliumized Comic
- The Witty Thinker
The Passionate Master
The Passionate Master only played 5 games in their life but they played them for 2000 hours each. When they like a game, they’ll play it for a lot of hours and become an active member of the community.
The Passionate Master gather their knowledge from those tons of hours and use it to talk and analyze the game. They mix analytical and technical skills to help understand the game. They’ll make tutorials and are in the head of leaderboards. When a game’s community is skeptic about something, the Passionate Master are among the one of voicing their thoughts, as they are an opinion leader.
But once a Master is fed up about a game, they might never return to it. It means they know everything about it and want to shift their business onto something else. They can also be pissed about a game developer vision and bear the community against it. For instance, Kripparrian, a big Hearthstone streamer, often leads the community when bringing critical feedback to Blizzard. He has personal relationships with both the community and the developer.
It’s very hard to get coverage from the Passionate Master, because their community only likes ONE GAME. Even if they’d love to review your game, their community might hate them for showing a game that isn’t THEIR FAVORITE GAME. But if you manage to get coverage, you can do wonders. It’s quite an “all or nothing” situation.
Some Masters you may know:
Kripparrian (Hearthstone), Dr Disrespect (PUBG), Northernlion (Binding of Isaac), esport players in general.
The Friendly Discoverer
The Friendly Discoverer likes to discover new games and share the first hours of gameplay. They have a few favorite games they’ll spend hours on, but they’ll mainly try to make people discover new things. Their community also likes to discover new games and talk about gaming in general. They are often friendly and have a nice, empathetic view on games they’re trying.
You can easily reach the Friendly Discoverer but as everyone is already reaching them, you will rarely get a response. It’s hard to get game coverage from a friendly explorer. And if they’re not 100% in the game, they’ll only do a video or two. But their community likes to discover games, so it can have a nice impact on your sales.
Some Friendly Discoverer you may know:
Zerator, Nathie, Pixe1ina.
The Heliumized Comic
The Heliumized Comic is always on the hunt for some funny stuff to show. It doesn’t matter if the game is bad, gore, sexist, trashy, scammy, pro LGBT, anti LGBT, weird. They and their community wants to laugh and get fun, that’s all! But it doesn’t mean they can’t be serious from time to time.
The Heliumized Comic can be one of those guys that is VERY SAD one day, then VERY HAPPY, then VERY EXCITED. They go in the extreme and have the best numbers because it’s always very intense. When they play a scary game, they’re SCARED TO DEATH. Their work is a lot about exaggerating emotions to maximize the empathy with their public and the catharsis they get through watching them playing.
Luckily for you, the Heliumized comic is always trying new games every day. They aren’t super picky about the quality of games, so if your game is fun, stupid and crazy, send them anyway. Even if they have millions of subscribers. But for very serious game or heavily narratives one, you may just skip their profile.
Some Heliumized Comic you may know:
Jackscepticeye, Markiplier, Vitecp
The Witty Thinker
The Witty Thinker likes to think and talk about gaming. They will vulgarize game design, gaming stories and theories. They can also run podcasts and gather other people to talk about gaming in general.
Their audience is primarily made of game developers and people who’ve been playing games for a very long time. My guess is that their audience is between 25 to 40 years old.
A Witty Thinker rarely covers a unique game without explaining it. From what I know, they’re rarely interested in sponsoring or advertising operations. You can still send them a game copy, but don’t expect too much.
Those game influencers will also rarely do several videos on a specific game. If your game is good, you might appear in one of the games shown in the background. To sum up: work with them if you have critical content or if they can bring a cool debate within your community.
Some Witty Thinker you may know:
Game Theorists, NoClip, Total Biscuit, Sid Alpha, Game Makers Toolkit.
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