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Telegram games like 'Notcoin' and 'Hamster Kombat' helped chart a new path for web3 gaming

Telegram games like 'Notcoin' and 'Hamster Kombat' helped chart a new path for web3 gaming

The BlockThe Block2024/12/30 16:00
By:The Block

Quick Take TON’s gaming lead said “around 20%” of Telegram’s 950 million global users were actively playing games. Thanks in large part to gaming, in roughly one year, the number of accounts on the TON network rose from approximately 4 million to 128 million.

Telegram games like 'Notcoin' and 'Hamster Kombat' helped chart a new path for web3 gaming image 0

User acquisition has long been the biggest challenge across the web3 gaming sphere. Then, in 2024, with the launch of mini-games on the Telegram messaging platform, it appeared that web3 gaming may have turned a corner. 

Telegram has said that it has 950 million users worldwide. With the introduction of clicker games that promised to reward players with token rewards, the messaging platform experienced a surge in gaming. In August, TON blockchain gaming lead Inal Kardan told The Block that “around 20%” of Telegram users were actively playing games.

TON, or The Open Network, is the blockchain network used by games published within Telegram.

The success of the mini-game "Notcoin" is credited by many as the title that kicked off the wave of game development within the TON ecosystem, largely due to the success of its airdrop. After launching in January, the "Notcoin" team then initiated a $1 billion token airdrop in May, with the project airdropping 80 billion NOT tokens.

"'Notcoin' was the one to sort of say this is how easy it is, anyone can do it," Martin Masser, chief business development officer at Ston.Fi, said when speaking at The Block’s Emergence crypto conference in Prague. "That was version one and now everyone is building on top of that."

Ston.Fi is a decentralized automated market maker built on the TON blockchain.

Following the lead of "Notcoin," other popular titles then launched, including "Hamster Kombat," "Yescoin" and "Catizen," although none have seen their tokens perform on par with "Notcoin." The "Notcoin" token had a market capitalization of about $700 million as of Dec. 18, according to The Block Price Page .

Explosive growth on TON network

The growth of gaming on Telegram clearly had a positive impact on the TON blockchain. In roughly one year, the number of accounts on the TON network increased from approximately 4 million to 128 million, according to TonStat data . Additionally, the blockchain's native token, toncoin, saw its price rise by over 100%, amassing a market capitalization of $14 billion as of Dec. 18, according to The Block Price Page.

"We have onboarded the regular web2 messenger users into the ecosystem, a lot of the time in order to receive the air drops from a lot of these tap-to-earn games, they had to create a wallet," Tobias Lewis, business development and partnership manager at The Open Platform, said at Emergence. "These users who had never experienced web3 or crypto before their first experience of web3 was intuitive, accessible, easy, not intimidating, which I think is a big barrier to entry for a lot of other ecosystems out there."

Now it appears the challenge is keeping Telegram gamers engaged and enticing them to try other blockchain-based apps live on the messaging platform. Even "Notcoin" founder Sasha Plotinov told The Block in June that he didn’t believe the clicker model, where users chase token rewards, would last.

"From my perspective, only the games that have sustainable models will survive," he said at the time.

Since launching "Notcoin," the game's creators have launched other gaming projects in an effort to expand beyond the success of their first game.

Alternative game distribution

However, the success of onboarding users has been undeniable, and according to Animoca Brands CEO Robby Yung, Telegram games have demonstrated an alternative way to publish crypto games.

"The biggest problem we have is that most of the big distribution platforms are kind of actively hostile to our industry that includes Apple and Google on the mobile side or in the game industry platforms like Steam or the console platforms," Yung said when speaking at The Block's Emergence conference . "So we don't really have great distribution channels. So what TON represents to us is this capability of having relatively unfettered distribution for a quite a broad audience."

In July, Animoca Brands subsidiaries, Mocaverse and MOCA Foundation, partnered with the TON Foundation and entered into a token-swap agreement to augment activity between the two ecosystems. The TON Foundation is a core contributor to, and advocate for, the TON ecosystem.

TON's gaming lead Kardan said he believed the next wave of games to gain traction on Telegram, titles with more potential for sustainability, will be "mid-core" games. Mid-core games, popular on mobile devices, tend to be more complicated and strategy-driven than casual games like "Hamster Kombat" and "Notcoin." These types of games can also generate significant revenue from in-app purchases as players pay to augment their gaming experience.

Lewis said that since the success of Telegram gaming, many influential firms have taken notice of the meteoric rise of gaming on the messaging app and should help to foster the development of new gamefied experiences. "We had a lot of big institutional players recognize the value proposition of TON and Telegram like Animoca and Pantera and they kind of gave the ecosystem a lot more; they made us more well known. So larger, bigger, more experienced teams started to come into the ecosystem."


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Disclaimer: The content of this article solely reflects the author's opinion and does not represent the platform in any capacity. This article is not intended to serve as a reference for making investment decisions.

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