Author: Frank, PANews
Notcoin's successful start forced the crypto world to re-examine the power of Telegram's ecosystem. With more than 35 million users, Binance mining activities, and a market value of $850 million before the opening, 35 million users and 5 million daily active users are unattainable for most crypto products.
However, the emergence of Notcoin does not seem to be an isolated phenomenon-level product. Similar products in the TON ecosystem are still springing up like mushrooms after rain. In terms of the number of users, the two projects, Hamster Kombat and Tapswap, are also replicating the legend of Notcoin.
Tapswap claims that it currently has more than 20 million users. According to TGstats data, the Tapswap community has become the world's second largest Telegram channel, with more than 8.4 million subscribers. Another small game, Hamster Kombat, claims to have more than 15 million users, and its community channel has about 7.9 million subscribers, ranking third in the world. The number of subscribers for these two projects has surpassed the previously popular Notcoin, which has 6.4 million channel subscribers, ranking fifth in the world. 
“Fascia Gun Mini Game” becomes TON game template?
The game modes of Hamster Kombat and Tapswap are similar to Notcoin’s game mode, both of which require users to click on the screen to obtain game coins. Due to the high frequency of clicks, many users use tools such as fascia guns to complete tasks out of laziness. This type of mindless clicking game is also called a “fascia gun game.”
The "fascia gun game" itself is not an innovation. It has long been widely used in various H5 games in the Web2 world. But in the success case of Notcoin, it has achieved new success by combining token mining with screen clicks. Perhaps because Notcoin has open-sourced the game code, this model has now become a paradigm for simple and easy-to-copy crypto games on TON.
However, the TON ecosystem is not just about the "fascia gun game". Another recently active game platform on TON, Catizen, is a game similar to Candy Crush using cartoon cats as the material. Catizen officials said that it currently has more than 7 million users and more than 1 million daily active users.
After PANews tried several popular games, it can be seen that even simple games have begun to upgrade their gameplay based on Notcoin. For example, Hamster Kombat has added props and investment cards, allowing players to earn coins in more ways than just clicking on the screen. Catizen is more playable, and its UI design style and the story background set by the cat cafe are combined with the gameplay of Candy Crush Saga to make it more interesting.
Are H5 mini games plus airdrops the true destination for blockchain games?
The development of blockchain games has always been difficult to balance between playability and economic benefits. In the last bull market, P2E games represented by Axie Infinity ignited the blockchain game track. However, the main idea of blockchain game development in the past was still focused on the token economic model within the game. Once this token economy is unbalanced, the game will also face a large number of user losses.
On the other hand, since blockchain games generally require interaction with wallets, they will also become a barrier for many Web2 users to enter. However, these small games that appear on the TON ecosystem can attract a large number of users in a short period of time. The main reason may be that the above two problems are solved:
1. The gaming experience is no different from Web2 games, and you can participate without linking your wallet. And the gaming experience does not require user education, and is simple and easy to use.
2. There is an expectation of airdrops. Although this type of game is not fun to play, compared with traditional Web2 games, the tokens in the game may become the tokens issued by the final project. This also means that user interaction can be converted into real money.
3. The distribution of tokens by airdrop does not involve the design of the economic model in the game. Compared with traditional blockchain games, the tokens of this type of mini-games are usually distributed by airdrop after a phase of activities. This results in users not knowing the specific value of the game coins when playing the game, so they will not seek profit and avoid harm or introduce excessive studio players to participate, causing the game economic model to collapse.
How much money can you make playing mini games?
Among the top five Telegram channels with the most subscribers worldwide, three are TON ecosystem projects.
At present, the most popular project in the TON ecosystem is Notcoin. Taking Notcoin as an example, the exchange ratio of game coins to tokens NOT was 1000:1. Among them, 78% of NOT tokens were distributed to 35 million users, and the average number of tokens allocated to each user was about 2291 tokens. Based on the opening price of NOT when it was launched at 0.0085, the amount allocated to each user was about US$19. Of course, this base is based on the user's game coins amount of about 2.29 million. According to PANews' experience with several similar games, obtaining such game coins is not a simple matter of interacting a few times, and it may take several days of frequent interaction.
However, judging from the current momentum, games such as Hamster Kombat, Tapswap, and Catizen are likely to break Notcoin's record in terms of data. After all, Hamster Kombat and Tapswap have become the top three TG channels in the world, surpassing Notcoin in this data. As for the number of users as high as 15 and 20 million, there is still no publicly verifiable data to confirm its authenticity.
From this perspective, subsequent Hamster Kombat and tapswap may find it difficult to have the same influence as Notcoin in terms of background and resources. Unless there is a greater breakthrough in the scale of its users, the economic effect of interactive games may not necessarily be very attractive.
