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Game marketing is changing, thanks to Hamster Kombat, a tapping mini-game on Telegram that has been downloaded more than 300 million times since March. It took only 73 days for Hamster Kombat to reach its first 100 million users.
Traditional marketing tactics are losing their power when it comes to attracting the attention of target audiences, said Tavia Wong, chief marketing officer at Credbull, a small private credit company in Asia with a dozen employees. The age of the viral game is back, at least on one platform. And many are starting to copy the formula like PiP World, Bondex, Gamee and Liithos.
In an interview with GamesBeat, she said that Web3 tap-and-earn games like Hamster Kombat are the unexpected inspiration for marketing professionals, and she believes every business can learn from their success, as well as how to leverage it for translating hype into revenue. Will it be a lifeline for Web3 games, which have struggled to get mainstream acceptance?
“When I first saw Hamster Kombat, I thought it was quite silly. It was going viral on Telegram and I thought it probably wasn’t going to go anywhere,” Wong said. “”But low and behold, the community has been growing really, really quickly. It’s one of the most successful games on Telegram, where there’s a cute hamster that a lot of people can just tap away on.”
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She added, “As a marketer, it really makes you sit up and go, ‘Okay, what’s there? Why is the community going so quickly?’ And it keeps growing.”
Hamster Kombat
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Hamster Kombat is a tap-to-earn crypto game on Telegram, where you click or tap on the screen. Players take the role of a CEO at a cryptocurrency exchange. The creators said in May 2024 that they would launch a token on The Open Network (TON), a Layer-1 blockchain originally created by Telegram. Now the development is being handled externally by the community.
In the game, players start as a bald hamster under contract to be a CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange. Users can tap the hamster avatar to generate in-game coins, but the main gameplay mechanic involves purchasing exchange upgrades to increase the hourly profit. You can earn coins by referring friends to play the game on Telegram or by finishing harder in-game tasks like solving a daily Morse code cipher.
It’s popular for the moment. But things can change. Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France and is being held on charges that the platform doesn’t do enough to protect user …