Have you ever wanted to mindlessly tap Elon Musk’s face for hours on end with the vague promise that it might one day earn you some money? No? Well, millions of people have been doing exactly that over the past few months as part of the latest craze to hit the cryptocurrency world: a collection of Cookie Clicker-style games on the messaging platform Telegram.
The craze began earlier this year with the launch of NotCoin, an incredibly simple app on Telegram where you could tap a virtual coin, like a cookie in Cookie Clicker. It was so simple as to be harmless, but it lacked the charm of Cookie Clicker.
Despite this, the game amassed millions of players, likely due to the promise of a crypto token that would be given to players based on how many coins they earned in-game. These token giveaways, known as airdrops in the cryptocurrency world, are often done when a new cryptocurrency is launched to build hype when it eventually goes up for sale on the open market, and in the process, drive up the price. With millions of $NOT tokens given to players, the cryptocurrency reached a peak price of $0.02896 shortly after the airdrop, meaning that some players, had they sold all of the tokens they were given at the right time, would have walked away with hundreds of dollars for free. At the time of writing, the Notcoin token is worth significantly less: $0.007754.
Obviously, this success gave rise to copycats hoping to cash in on their own pay-per-click games. One such copycat was the Banana game that rose to the top of Steam a few months ago, while hundreds of others have since appeared on Telegram, attempting to cash in on the large cryptocurrency community already using the messaging app.
“As we’ve seen with platforms like WeChat, these built-in mini-apps are a powerful feature within social messaging platforms,” Lennix Lai, global business director at cryptocurrency exchange OKX, told me. “With nearly a billion active users, a messaging-centric design, and seamless bot integration, Telegram is a great fit for casual gaming. Telegram was perfectly positioned to translate that incredible reach and user attention into gaming.”
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Now, the market leader is Hamster Kombat, a game where you are a hamster running a cryptocurrency exchange. You tap your hamster like you would currency in NotCoin, but you can also reinvest the in-game currency you earn into additional features for your imaginary exchange that will provide you with passive income when the game is closed. While it hasn’t launched its own crypto token yet, an airdrop has been announced for September 26, 2024 with millions of tokens to be given out to players.
The Hamster Kombat development team claims it has over 300 million players and has become so popular in some countries that Iran’s deputy army chief criticized the game for distracting people from the recent presidential election. For people living in countries where jobs are hard to come by or where economic challenges are destabilizing the entire economy, the potential promise of earning crypto tokens for playing a game is hard to ignore.
“In the case of Hamster Kombat, when I look at the player base, it’s huge,” Sten, a player from Kenya who has already earned 540 $NOT tokens and is now playing Hamster Kombat, tells me. “So [it will] probably [have] A higher market cap and with some hype, $HMSTR can generate several X [increase in value several times]”I think $HMSTR is going to be a great asset, that's why I'm playing it. When they release it, I'll buy more.”
“I haven’t won much so far,” says Jerome, a gamer from Nigeria who started playing these games recently but is already playing eight different titles in the hope of winning some money. One of them is called Lost Dogs, a Telegram game in which players bet on which of three story options will be the second most chosen by players each day. [from] Lost dogs, yesterday I withdrew 0.84$NOT. I hope to earn tokens in airdrops, I hope to earn up to 150$.”
Research from the Global Living Wage Coalition suggests that a living wage in some areas of Kenya could be as low as US$237 per month, meaning the US$4.18 that Sten could sell his NOT tokens for at the time of writing is not an insignificant amount of money. In Nigeria, the same organisation suggests that a living wage could be as low as US$146 per month, so if Jerome hits his targets this could be a significant payout for him.
“Incentives are definitely important,” Lai says. “This applies to all aspects of human behavior, as we are all motivated by a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic factors. Tokens can significantly accelerate community growth by creating viral loops and driving behavior. However, that’s not enough to sustain a large-scale community. It’s also about smart marketing, consistently delivering on promises, and staying loyal to the community. Gameplay matters, too. The ideal combination is fun gameplay and aligned incentives. When done right, tokens are the foundation for long-term, sustainable growth based on loyalty and fun.”
That last part is the sticking point for most of these apps; none of them are very fun. Some try to implement slightly different mechanics, like Catizen (not to be confused with Herocraft’s Catizens colony simulator). Here, you swipe to combine cats of the same level in your cat cafe to make them more valuable. Others just change what you tap, like X Empire, which features the aforementioned cartoon Elon Musk to punch in the face.
These are pretty silly apps, barely worthy of being considered games, offering little more than adding numbers. Even the charm of Cookie Clicker, with its nice visuals and potentially unlimited play time, is missing, often replaced by mobile game-style barriers designed to keep you coming back every few hours or spending money.
But the fact that they aren't fun is probably the least offensive part of these games. In an attempt to expand the player base, almost every Telegram game I've tried will reward you for inviting your friends to join the game, and some even block progress.
Pixel Tap, another popular tap game, outright blocks you from getting past level three unless you invite at least one friend, and when the airdrop came around, level three wasn’t enough to be eligible for any tokens. But for every friend you invited, you got 5% of the in-game currency they earned, and 1% of everything the players they invited earned, essentially creating something indicative of a virtual pyramid scheme, or MLM (multi-level marketing), that eventually paid out crypto tokens to those at the top. The Pixel Tap cryptocurrency peaked at $0.0977 shortly after it launched, but at the time of writing it’s now worth $0.006405 — less than a tenth of that peak.
These sorts of schemes are common, though microtransactions that are clearly pay-to-win and grant certain advantages are also present. Catizen, for example, will sell you an upgrade where all cats that arrive at your café will automatically combine with others of the same level, removing the only real mechanic it has. That requires 3,900 of its premium currency, which will set you back about $13. Whether that purchase will pay off when the in-game token launches remains to be seen.
“For Catizen, to enable automatic mode [combining] “Cats, I spent some money,” a Singaporean player who wishes to remain anonymous tells me. Previously, they had managed to get some airdrops of the Solana Saga phone, a Web-3-based mobile phone that occasionally sends tokens to its owners. “So, I thought maybe I could get some airdrops here as well,” he says. “It’s totally fine if there’s no airdrop, [but] I will be very happy if there is a small amount of airdrop.”
In an interview with Eurogamer, Catizen Foundation president Tim Wong revealed to me that as of 27 July 2024, the game has generated $16,875,769 in cryptocurrency from in-game purchases since its launch in March. To its credit, Catizen has also pledged to donate 1% of its revenue to charities that help cats. A $100,000 donation was recently made to PETA, but the community backlash regarding the charity's story prompted them to pause the ongoing partnership and look for other potential charities to work with.
For many gamers around the world, these games offer the promise of future riches. Another NotCoin-style token airdrop could provide some players with the equivalent of several months’ salary if they play for long enough. But currently only a handful of these games have successfully airdropped tokens, and nearly all of them have lost a significant amount of their value since becoming publicly tradable, with most having little to no use beyond being bought and sold. Some games promise future expansions or new games in the same ecosystem, but few have done so so far, leaving most airdropped tokens fairly useless.
“The Catizen user base will continually evolve,” says Wong. “What I mean is that some users who joined solely for the airdrop might sell their tokens and leave the community after the token generation event. This is inevitable. However, there will also be people who recognize the long-term value of $CATI and choose to become part of our community. These new members will likely be of higher quality and more engaged. The airdrop is just the beginning of opening up the entire Catizen ecosystem to the community.”
Getting paid to play video games is the dream of many, and now millions of people are getting that experience through tap-to-win games. But the predatory and insidious tactics used to lure players in with the promise of future riches (not to mention systems that seem to rig payouts against those at the bottom) seem like a bad first version of the idea. Someday, someone might figure out how to make a pay-to-play game that’s fun and fair for everyone. But these Telegram games almost certainly aren’t that.