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The founders seem exasperated by the game’s “hyper-casual” label. “Some people call it a tap-to-play game. It’s not exactly right and dumbs it down,” say the creators. “You only need to tap at the very beginning. Very soon, you get access to all the passive income streams which quickly outweigh everything else.”
When asked to explain the game’s cartoonishly simple mechanics, they reply, “Have you ever tried Tinder?” They clarified that “modern apps have spent millions of dollars learning how to put people on board.” The simplicity is a feature not a bug. (Things are less simple in the US, where Telegram does not support a native crypto wallet, thanks to regulatory concerns and earlier settlements with the SEC. Technically TON and Telegram are separate entities.)
The big looming question, apart from the creators’ identities, is whether the game can be sustainable. (Crypto projects get that question a lot.) “You cannot get monetary value from tapping the screen. It’s obvious,” says Diadkov. Then again, the question of whether digital cryptocurrency can have “real value” has existed since the inception of bitcoin, and you can argue that if a community decides that something has value, it has value.
That perceived value, of course, can be fickle. Axie Infinitythe “play-to-earn” gaming darling from the last crypto bull market, ultimately flopped. I ask the founders point-blank how Hamster Kombat is different from Axie. (One difference is obvious: Axie users had to buy NFTs to play the game, and those could cost over $100.)
“First, we are already profitable. We have multiple revenue channels,” the founders claim. “We sell ads in our game. We get money from our YouTube ads (we have 18 channels in different languages). We have the largest Telegram channel, and Telegram shares the advertising revenue with channel owners.”
You’d also be hard-pressed to find many online communities that claim 300 million members. This alone has value. Even if the Hamster Kombat game itself is economically unsustainable, that community can be monetized. And now they’re onboarded into the TON ecosystem.
“This is a fairly genius stroke from the Telegram team,” says David Nage, a portfolio manager at Arca, a Web3 VC firm. He views Hamster Kombat (and the other games like Notcoin) as an entrance to a shopping mall, and now everyone will watch to see what people do once they’re there. “What do they do next?” Nage says. “Do they go to the mini-app store? Do they use social-fi applications? Are there DeFi applications?”
Hamster Kombatin a sense, is a Trojan horse to get people into crypto. Telegram CEO Durov has said it has the potential to introduce “the benefits of blockchain to hundreds of millions of people.” The creators say this is their endgame. It was designed as a tongue-in-cheek meta-classroom for crypto concepts. “We want to onboard the next billion people to Web3, so we had to show everyone how Web3 actually works,” say the founders. “And the simplest way to do so is through the game.”
What’s next for Hamster Kombat? In a just-released white paper, the creators claim its upcoming airdrop will be “the largest airdrop in the history of crypto.” That will reward hundreds of millions of users with a “HMSTR” token that has an uncertain value. They can then sell it or use it in a new Hamster Economy. “We want to build an ecosystem around Hamster Kombat centered around game publishing,” say the creators. “That’s what we know how to do best. The future token will be at the center of this ecosystem of interconnected games and services.”
Maybe the token will go to the moon, and some of these Hamster CEOs will become actual millionaires. Maybe the token will crash, leaving millions of players jaded. Both options are in play. That, too, is how Web3 actually works.
Correction: 8/1/2024, 1:40 pm EDT: Wired corrected the name of The Open Network.