At the start of 2024, the first Telegram tap-to-earn game was a curiosity—an enigma. Notcoin’s success had created a small industry that was in high demand by the end of 2024. As quickly as Telegram Gaming came and went, its time has also passed.
When Notcoin launched back in January, we barely knew what to make of it. Why was everyone tapping the coin on their phone’s messaging app so much? Was this a meta-commentary about the crypto-world or a true on-chain token?
Notcoin chose to keep it simple, allowing users to earn by simply tapping. This simplicity combined with a growing buzz around TON and an anti-establishment feel attracted 35 million users in just three months.
Tap-to-earn had already reached its peak by the time Notcoin’s airdrop distributed tokens worth hundreds of millions dollars to the players. This value soared to billions within a few weeks. Hamster Kommbat was the one to pick up that torch.
While still ultimately built around a tapping mechanism, Hamster Kombat shifted gears, taking the form of a very streamlined management sim as you launched and expanded your own crypto exchange—as a fuzzy hamster, of course.
Hamster Kombat was a big hit, despite its silly premise. The game’s social networking accounts grew rapidly and within a few months the creators boasted about hundreds of millions players.
It all went awry.
According to reports, massage guns sold out quickly in Russia because players were using their repetitive rhythmic vibrations for Hamster Kombat’s tapping game. In June, a senior Iranian military official lashed out at the growing popularity of the game in Iran, claiming it could affect the upcoming presidential elections.
“One of the features of the soft war by the enemy is the ‘Hamster’ game,” The state-run media reported that Iran’s vice military chief, Rear Adm. Habibollah Sayyari said. IRNA News Agency
Hamster Kombat, which announced in July that it had attracted 300 million players, was not the only game to be impacted by Telegram. Catizen, Yescoin, and other titles also benefited from the trend.
Hamster Kombat’s airdrop had a lot riding on it. A smash success would confirm the viability of the tap-to-earn model and its repeatability—that Notcoin wasn’t a fluke, and that a game that pushed into the mainstream could still deliver that kind of value at scale.
Many players claim on social media that they have gotten better instead. “dust.”
Hamster’s Kombat HMSTR airdrop delivered free tokens worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to its players in September. It created real value and rewarded players with cryptocurrency. With 130 million eligible players, it’s not surprising that people only received a few coins worth a couple of dollars. They were also frustrated.
Since Notcoin, every notable Telegram airdrop has also been marked by similar unhappiness. It’s partly because airdrops are more complicated and cluttered as developers have moved away from Notcoin, while trying to make their users earn money. You can also read about other ways to get in touch with us. Games to feed the hype cycle
Catizen, a Telegram-based puzzle game featuring cats, upset a lot of players when it changed the criteria that determined who was eligible for an airdrop right before its launch. It favored heavily those users who spent money on perks.
Tomarket claimed that it had held the token-generation event in October. However, this was not true. “tokens” Players would be unable to trade their TOMA until the exchanges had listed it. The final admission was that the game had been a sham. “in-game" token launch and that nothing had been minted to TON—and then a week before the airdrop, Tomarket said that TOMA would be minted on Aptos instead.
As the year comes to an end, the makers of games like Tomarket and MemeFi are trying to explain to their players why their respective tokens aren’t worth much. Meanwhile, early Notcoin followers like Yescoin and Tapswap still haven’t launched their own tokens.
Hamster Kombat, meanwhile, is just sort of stuck in limbo after the airdrop. The team teased a “Season 2” overhaul with new gameplay, but missed its launch target by nearly two months as of this writing, with dwindling player counts and fewer updates in the official Telegram channel. Now the team says it’s launching three 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 and surging meme coins.
Experts are mixed on the future of tap-to-earn games. Some have said that the games need to be more engaging and more robust; others suggest that such simple tapping mechanisms should only be used as an onboarding and engagement tool for new platforms and projects.
Tap-to-earn gaming repackaged the play-to-earn craze from 2021, streamlining and simplifying the concept and making it more palatable for the masses. It worked, if only briefly, but a lot of the same underlying issues ultimately reared their head.
Is the next Notcoin just around the corner in 2025? Perhaps. Players and creators have learned hard lessons since the boom.