GG Story of the Year 2024: Telegram Tap-to-Earn Gaming Explodes, Next Implodes

At the start of 2024, the second Telegram tap-to-earn activity was a curiosity—an mystery. By the end of the year, the popularity of Notcoin had created a mini-industry that had attracted a lot of business. And still, as quickly as Telegram game came, it likewise went, and it extremely feels like its moment has passed.

When Notcoin launched&nbsp, back in January, we hardly knew what to produce of it. Why did people constantly tuck a penny into a messaging apps on their phones? Would there be a true on-chain gift, or was this just some kind of meta-commentary on the blockchain world?

There would be a real token being minted on The Open Network ( TON), and Notcoin opted to keep things simple: You tap and you’ll make. 35 million people were drawn to the game in just three months due to the combination of that simplicity, an impressive anti-establishment feeling, and growing speed around TON.

Tap-to-earn was on its last breath when the Notcoin airdrop delivered people ‘ hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tokens, with that price rising rapidly in the coming days. And that’s where Hamster Kombat picked up the torch.

Hamster Kombat changed gears as you launched and expanded your own crypto exchange, moving forward with a very streamlined management sim, while still being ultimately built around a tapping mechanism ( as a fuzzy hamster, of course ).

As silly as that idea sounds, Hamster Kombat hit difficult. As the show’s social media accounts exploded within a few months, the creators boasted of hundreds of millions of people.

And finally things got crazy.

As people used their repetitive, monotonous vibrations to control Hamster Kombat’s touching game, treatment guns were reportedly selling out in Russia. Additionally, an Iranian military standard criticized the country’s growing influence on people in June, suggesting it would have an impact on the upcoming presidential election.

” One of the functions of the gentle battle by the army is the’ Hamster ‘ game”, said Iran’s assistant military commander Back Adm. Habibollah Sayyari, according to the state-run news organization.

By the time Hamster Kombat announced it had pulled 300 million people in full in July, different activities like Catizen and Yescoin were likewise exploding with their own take on the idea.

A bit was riding on Hamster Kombat’s resupply. A smash success may demonstrate that the tap-to-earn model and its repeatability, that a mainstream game could also provide that kind of value at scale, and that Notcoin wasn’t just a fluke.

Rather, as some people may say via social media posts, they got “dust”.

In September, Hamster Kombat’s HMSTR airstrike essentially created value by rewarding players with real bitcoin by providing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free tokens. However, it shouldn’t be surprising that some 130 million people ended up with only a few cents worth of cash because of the airdrop’s potential. And they were frustrated.

Every distinctive Telegram gambling airdrop since Notcoin has been tagged with unsatisfaction of a similar nature. As developers turned away from Notcoin’s simplicity and focused on monetizing their players, all while putting them into different games to bolster the buzz cycle, the airdrops have become significantly messier, marked by difficulties.

For instance, the cat-themed Telegram puzzle game Catizen offended a sizable number of players by changing the airdrop eligibility criteria ideal before the sign launch, favoring people who had paid for benefits in real money.

Tomarket said it held its token technology event in October, but then the” cryptocurrencies” provided to people wouldn’t be sellable until TOMA had been listed by markets. Finally, the team admitted that it was an “in-game” key release and that nothing had been minted to TON—and then a week before the airdrop, Tomarket said that TOMA had been minted on Aptos otherwise.

The creators of matches like Tomarket and MemeFi are trying to reveal to their people why their respective currencies aren’t very valuable as the year comes to an end. However, early Notcoin enthusiasts like Yescoin and Tapswap also haven’t launched their own currencies.

Hamster Kombat, however, is just kind of stuck in purgatory after the resupply. The team teased a” Season 2″ overhaul with new play, but it fell short of its release goal by almost two months as of this writing due to declining person matters and fewer improvements in the official Telegram network. Now the team says it’s launching games as a” HamsterVerse”.

On top of the repetitive gameplay, the increasingly messy token launches, and players burned by deceptive promises, crypto industry attention has gone elsewhere in a more bullish market—back towards Bitcoin&nbsp, and surging meme coins.

Experts are mixed on the future of tap-to-earn games. While some claim that the games should be more engaging and robust, others say that these straightforward tapping techniques should only be employed as an onboarding and engagement tool for new platforms and projects.

Tap-to-earn gaming simplified the play-to-earn craze and simplified the idea to appeal to the masses, reviving it from 2021. It worked, if only briefly, but a lot of the same underlying issues ultimately reared their head.

In 2025, will there be a Notcoin release? Perhaps. However, after the initial boom, both players and creators learned some difficult lessons, and any conceits about obtaining crypto-richness have quickly dissipated.