With the first start of 2024 Telegram click to win game It was a curiosity – a mystery. By the end of the year, it was a success Not a currency It has spawned a small industry that has attracted huge demand. However, as quickly as Telegram games appeared, they also disappeared, and it seems that their moment has passed.

When Notcoin launched back in January, we... He hardly knew what to do with it. Why were people constantly tapping a coin within the messaging app on their phones? Will there be a real on-chain token, or was this just some sort of meta commentary about the world of cryptocurrencies?

There will be a real token minted on it Open network (TON), Notcoin chooses to keep things simple: just tap and you win. This simplicity, coupled with an enticing anti-establishment atmosphere and growing momentum around TON, eventually attracted 35 million players to the game in just three months.

By the time the Notcoin airdrop had delivered tokens worth hundreds of millions of dollars to players of that value It rises to billions of dollars Within weeks, the click-to-earn program was ready to explode. And this is the place Hamster Kombat I picked up the torch.

Although Hamster Kombat is still ultimately built on a clicking mechanism, it has changed gears, taking the form of a much simplified management sim as you launch and expand your cryptocurrency exchange – like a mysterious hamster, of course.

Although this idea seems ridiculous, Hamster Kombat has been a huge success. Within a few months, the game's makers boasted hundreds of millions of players as the game's social media accounts soared.

And then things got weird.

It was massage guns It was reportedly sold in Russia Players use their rhythmic, repetitive vibrations to manipulate the gameplay of Hamster Kombat. In June, an Iranian military official Swipe the game's increasing grip On players in the country, suggesting that it will affect the upcoming presidential elections.

“One of the features of the soft war practiced by the enemy is the hamster game,” Iranian Deputy Army Commander Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said, according to what the state-run agency reported. Irna news agency.

Telegram Games was having an impact on the real world, and by the time Hamster Kombat announced it was pulling out 300 million total players in JulyOther games like Catisine and Yes Quinn They were also thriving with their own tunes in the foreground.

There was a lot that relied on Hamster Kombat's airdrops. An overwhelming success would confirm the viability and replication of the click-to-earn model — that Notcoin wasn't just a fluke, and that a game that has reached the mainstream is still capable of delivering this kind of value at scale.

Instead, as Many players may claim Through social media posts, they received “dust.”

Hamster Kombat's HMSTR airdrop in September provided hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free tokens to players, effectively creating value out of nothing and rewarding players with real cryptocurrency. But with around 130 million players eligible for the airdrop, it wasn't surprising to see people end up with a few bucks worth of coins. And they were frustrated.

Every notable Telegram gaming airdrop since Notcoin has been marked with similar dissatisfaction. This is partly because airdrops have become more chaotic and complex as developers move away from the simplicity of Notcoin and try to monetize their players, all while turning them into last Games to feed the hype cycle.

For example, the Telegram puzzle game called Catizen, It angered quite a few players By changing the airdrop eligibility factors just before the token launch, resulting in a significant preference for those who have spent real money to pay for the perks.

Tomarket said Token generation event held in October, but after that the “tokens” offered to players will not be tradable until TOMA is listed on exchanges. Eventually, the team admitted that it was a token “in-game” launch and that nothing had been minted for TON — and then a week before the airdrop, Tomarket said that TOMA It will be minted on Aptos instead of.

As the year comes to a close, game makers love... Tomarket and mimify They try to explain to players why their tokens are not worth much. Meanwhile, early Notcoin followers such as Yescoin and Tapswap They still haven't released their tokens.

Meanwhile, Hamster Kombat is kind of stuck in limbo after the airdrop. Team A raised Fix "Season Two". With new gameplay, but it missed the launch target by about two months as of this writing, with a dwindling number of players and a lack of updates in the official Telegram channel. Now the team says so release three games As a "HamsterVerse".

On top of repetitive gameplay, increasingly chaotic token launches, and players getting burned by deceptive promises, the cryptocurrency industry's attention has turned elsewhere in a more bullish market – once again towards... Bitcoin Rising coins meme.

Experts disagree about the future of click-to-win games. Some said games should be like that More attractive and more powerful; Others suggest that such simple eavesdropping mechanisms should be just that Used as a qualification and engagement tool For new platforms and projects.

Click to earn games have been repackaged Madness of playing to earn from 2021Simplifying and simplifying the concept and making it more acceptable to the masses. It worked, if only briefly, but a lot of the same basic issues eventually came to light.

Is the next Notcoin around the corner in 2025? maybe. But gamers and creators alike learned some hard lessons from the initial boom, and any illusions about exploiting your way to crypto riches quickly faded.