Compared to the traditional gaming market, blockchain games remain miniscule. Although 2024 started off with booming web3 gaming tokens, the total number players didn’t seem to pick up significantly.
Now that narrative seems to be changing, however, and to a large extent it’s thanks to Telegram and its integration of social mini-games on the TON blockchain. Using TON’s tech stack, developers can build games and other dapps, including wallets and exchanges, on top of Telegram.
While Facebook kickstarted the social gaming breakthrough with Zynga’s Farmville in 2010, Telegram has sparked what some predict to be the mass adoption of web3. A major contrast to Facebook however, is that through TON, games on Telegram can access payment systems, NFT storage solutions, smart contracts, and more.
Web3 investor Delphi Digital recently published its A TON of Gaming Hype report, which looks into the ecosystem in further detail and highlights its most notable games.
Although they’re nothing like ambitious extraction shooter Shrapnel or the deep social mechanics of Pixels and Alien Worlds, TON’s ecosystem games shouldn’t be brushed off as insignificant. Available to the 900 million users Telegram claims to have, if nothing else, these games show how the pain point of onboarding friction in web3 can be overcome. And no doubt, the genres of games building on TON are going to expand beyond easy clicker games. Indeed, they already are.
Less than a week ago we reported that the TON platform had grown from 120 to 160 games. Now it’s up to 176. As the momentum has steadily grown throughout 2024, tap game Notcoin, which launched on 1st January, was one of the first to kick it off.
In mid-June, it claimed to have hit 40 million users. Its NOT token launched on Binance at $1 billion FDV in June, peaked at $2.1 billion, and has since gone down to around $1.45 billion, according to the report. More recently, the price of NOT has increased again following an announcement it’s joined forces with AI/web3 gaming analytics company Helika to help game developers building on Telegram.
Jointly leading the charge with Notcoin is Hamster Kombat. Unlike NOT, its token is yet to be launched, and that’s accelerating its traction. The latest claimed number of players is 250 million.
Another game growing in esteem more recently is Catizen. Previously building games on WeChat, its developer has seen its cat breeding swipe game attract over 20 million registered users within two months of launching. Notably, according to the report “Catizen is the top game by in-game revenue through IAPs on TON. Over $10 million in TON has been sunk into the game by their 2.7 million DAU. Additionally, around 50% of the 1.25 million on-chain users are paying customers.”
It’s worth noting that to a large extent, Catizen’s growth is down to its future token airdrop, with the promise of 42% being allocated to players at the token launch.
Putting its user numbers in context, it’s worth comparing to the onchain data we regularly gather from analytics platforms such as DappRadar. It’s not clear why the numbers don’t align, but while Catizen itself claims millions of daily users, its DAUW total is only tracked at around 100,000 daily wallets. This highlights some of the data reporting issues arising from the highly viral and very-easy-to-bot Telegram/TON-based games.
Moreover, we recently looked at the level of bots in games such as Pixels, Splinterlands, and Alien Worlds, which showed that bot activity can quickly surge despite active measures against it. Games on TON are not immune to this. Indeed, quite the opposite, some might say they provide an ideal environment for bots to thrive.
Another crucial question is how well these games can retain their users. As the report points out, “Although those numbers are impressive, teams building on TON will need to prove their ability to run successful liveops and convert free-to-play users into paying customers without infinite inflationary token reward strategies.”
To this end, more niched games like Fanton, a fantasy soccer game which doesn’t promise big token payouts, could be a more sustainable bet. Although nothing the size of Notcoin or Hamster Kombat, yet, Fanton shows there’s potential for other games beyond easy clickers on TON. Claiming 200,000 monthly active users, the free-to-play tournaments run over the last couple of weeks only reached 1000-5000 players however.
Among all the clicker tokens is TON’s own TON token. Where many gaming and meme-coins have zero utility, TON is the underlying gas token used for all transactions on the network. Moreover, validators need to stake TON to participate in the validation process, and developers need TON tokens to run smart contracts on the blockchain.
Although not limited to gaming activity, the TON blockchain currently has 39.7 million total user wallets, 9.8 monthly actives and 370,000 DAUW.
At the start of 2024, the price of TON was $2.27, now up to $7.30. In the last year, it’s up by 433%, as per CoinGecko, making TON a significant factor in driving web3 gaming forward, while much else keeps sinking.
