Crypto Bros Have Discovered Idle Games, and the Results Are Incredibly Boring

Ever wanted to spend hours mindlessly tapping Elon Musk’s face with the vague promise that it might just make you some money someday? No? Well, millions of people have done just that in recent months as part of the latest crypto craze: a collection of Cookie Clicker-like games on messaging platform Telegram.

The craze started earlier this year with the launch of NotCoin, an incredibly simple app on Telegram that involved tapping a virtual coin, just like the cookie in Cookie Clicker. It was simple enough to not be offensive, but lacked the charm of Cookie Clicker.

Despite this, the game attracted millions of players, likely due to the promise of a crypto token that would be given to players based on how many coins they earned in the game. These token giveaways, known in the crypto world as airdrops, are often done when a new cryptocurrency is launched in order to generate hype when it is eventually sold on the open market, driving up its price in the process. With millions of $NOT tokens given away to players, the crypto peaked at $0.02896 shortly after the airdrop, meaning that some players, if they sold all the tokens they were given at the right time, walked away with hundreds of dollars for free. At the time of writing, the Notcoin token is worth considerably less, at $0.007754.

Naturally, this success gave rise to copycats, hoping to cash in with their own tap-to-earn games. One such copycat was the Banana game that hit the top of Steam a few months ago, while hundreds of others have since sprung up on Telegram, trying to capitalize on the large crypto community already using the messaging app.

“As we’ve seen with platforms like WeChat, these embedded mini-apps are a powerful feature within social messaging platforms,” Lennix Lai, global chief commercial officer at crypto exchange OKX, told me. “With nearly 1 billion active users, a messaging-centric design, and seamless bot integration, Telegram is ideal for casual gaming. Telegram was perfectly positioned to convert that incredible reach and user attention into gaming.”

Now the market leader is Hamster Kombat, a game where you play as a hamster running a cryptocurrency exchange. You tap your hamster as you would the coin in NotCoin, but you can also reinvest the in-game currency you earn into additional features for your imaginary exchange that will provide you with passive income when the game is closed. While it has yet to launch its own crypto token, an airdrop has been announced for September 26, 2024, where millions of tokens will be distributed to players.

Hamster Kombat’s development team claims it has over 300 million players, and it’s become so popular in some countries that the deputy chief of Iran’s military criticized the game for distracting people from the recent presidential election. For people in countries where jobs are hard to come by, or where economic challenges are destabilizing the entire economy, the potential promise of earning crypto tokens for playing a game is hard to ignore.

“For Hamster Kombat, if I look at the player base, it’s huge,” Sten, a player from Kenya who has already earned 540 $NOT tokens and is now playing Hamster Kombat, tells me. “So (it will) probably have (a) higher market cap and with some hype $HMSTR can pump multiple X (increase in value multiple times). I believe $HMSTR is going to be huge, that’s why I’m playing it. Once it’s listed, I’m going to buy more.”

“I haven’t made much money so far,” says Jerome, a player from Nigeria who only recently started playing the games but has already played eight different titles in hopes of making some money. One of them is called Lost Dogs, a Telegram game where you bet on which of three story options will be chosen second most by players each day. “Just (from) Lost Dogs, I withdrew 0.84$NOT yesterday. I’m hoping to get tokens in the airdrops, I’m hoping to get like $150.”

Research from the Global Living Wage Coalition suggests that a living wage in parts of Kenya could be as low as $237 USD per month, meaning that the $4.18 that Sten can sell his NOT tokens for at the time of writing is not a trivial amount. In Nigeria, the same organization suggests that a living wage could be as low as $146 USD per month, so if Jerome hits his targets, that could be a significant payday for him.

“Incentives matter, that’s for sure,” Lai says. “This applies to all aspects of human behavior, as we are all motivated by a mix of extrinsic and intrinsic factors. Tokens can significantly accelerate community growth by creating viral loops and driving behavior. But that’s not enough to sustain a community at scale. It’s also about smart marketing, consistently delivering on promises, and staying loyal to the community. Gameplay is also important. The ideal combination is fun gameplay and aligned incentives. Done right, tokens are the foundation for long-term, sustainable growth based on loyalty and fun.”

That last one is the stumbling block for most of these apps; none of them are particularly fun. Some try to implement marginally different mechanics, such as Catizen (not to be confused with Herocraft’s colony sim Catizens). Here, you swipe to match cats of the same level in your cat café to make them more valuable. Others simply change what you tap, with X Empire featuring the aforementioned cartoon Elon Musk to punch in the face.

These are fairly mindless apps that can barely be considered games and offer little more than to run up the numbers. Even the charm of Cookie Clicker, with its pleasing visuals and potentially limitless playtime, is missing – often replaced by mobile game-like barriers designed to keep you coming back every few hours, or spending money.

But not being fun is probably the least offensive part of these games. In an effort to expand the player base, almost every one of these Telegram games I tried rewards you for inviting friends to join the game, with some even blocking progress behind it.

Pixel Tap, another popular tap game, prevents you from advancing past level three unless you invite at least one friend. And when the airdrop rolled around, level three wasn’t enough to qualify for tokens. But for every friend you invited, you got 5% of the in-game currency they earned and 1% of everything the players they invited earned, essentially creating something akin to a virtual pyramid scheme, or MLM (multi-level marketing), that eventually paid out crypto tokens to those at the top. The Pixel Tap crypto peaked at $0.0977 shortly after launch, but at the time of writing is now worth $0.006405, less than a tenth of that high.

Such schemes are common, while microtransactions that are clearly pay-to-win by granting certain benefits are also present. Catizen, for example, sells you an upgrade where all cats that arrive at your cafe automatically combine with others of the same level, removing the only real mechanic it has. That requires 3900 of its premium currency, which will set you back around $13. Whether that purchase will pay off when the game’s token launches remains to be seen.

“For Catizen, I spent some money to enable the automatic mode of (combining) kittens,” said a player from Singapore who wished to remain anonymous. They had previously managed to get some airdrops from the Solana Saga phone, a Web-3-based mobile phone that occasionally airdrops tokens to owners. “So I thought maybe I could get some airdrops here too,” they said. “It’s totally fine if there’s no airdrop, (but) I would be very happy if there’s a small amount of airdrop.”

In an interview with Eurogamer, Catizen Foundation chairman Tim Wong told me that the game had earned $16,875,769 worth of crypto from in-game purchases since its launch in March as of July 27, 2024. Catizen has also committed to donating 1% of its revenue to charities that help cats. A recent $100,000 donation was made to PETA, but community backlash over the charity’s history prompted them to pause the ongoing partnership and instead look at other potential charities to partner with.

For many players around the world, these games offer the promise of future riches. Another NotCoin-like token launch could earn some players the equivalent of several months’ salary if they played long enough. However, currently only a handful of these games have successfully launched tokens, and nearly all of them have lost a significant portion of their value since becoming publicly tradable, with most having little to no use beyond being bought and sold. Some games promise future expansions, or new games in the same ecosystem, but few have yet to deliver, making most airdropped tokens virtually useless.

“The Catizen user base will continue to evolve,” Wong said. “What I mean is that some users who signed up just for the airdrop may sell their tokens and leave the community after the Token Generation Event. This is inevitable. However, there will also be those who recognize the long-term value of $CATI and choose to be part of our community. These new members will likely be of higher quality and more dedicated. The airdrop is just the beginning of opening up the entire Catizen ecosystem to the community.”

Getting paid to play video games is the dream of many, and now millions are getting that experience via tap-to-earn games. But the predatory and underhanded tactics used to lure players in with the promise of future riches—not to mention systems that appear to manipulate payouts to the detriment of those at the bottom—feels like a poor first iteration of the idea. Someday, someone will perhaps figure out how to make a paid-to-play game that’s fun and fair for everyone. But these Telegram games almost certainly aren’t it.