What's going on with Hamster Kombat: How the popular Telegram mini-app is failing
Since its launch, the Hamster Kombat game has reached incredible heights, broken all sorts of records, and everyone was talking about it from everywhere. But as it turned out, the brighter the star shines, the faster it can burn out.
More than 250 million people worldwide are active in Hamster Kombat. The Telegram mini-app has become a real sensation, breaking all sorts of records for the growth rate of players and subscribers in some social networks. Hamster Kombat attracts 4-5 million new users every day, which did not go unnoticed by Pavel Durov.
Millions of players tap on the screen of their phones every day in the hope of making a profit from the earned tokens, which in fact do not exist in nature yet.
The Tap-to-earn movement in Telegram once caused a furore among participants in the crypto industry. After the successful debut of Notcoin, dozens of analogues appeared promising profits for simple activity. But the longer this trend exists, the more soberly people begin to look at it. The loss of interest in Hamster Kombat, the activation of scammers, talk of a ban and more — all this indicates the imminent decline of not only this popular application, but also the entire tap industry.
What's wrong with the hamster?
The popularity of the Hamster Kombat game has a dark side. On the eve of the upcoming listing, the date of which no one knows, scammers have become more active. Last week, the community was faced with a fake distribution of the HMSTR token. The X account, which has nothing to do with the creators of the game, announced that it will send users a token within 24 hours if they connect their wallets.
And despite the fact that the news turned out to be fake, and the game team then warned about scam activity, many users remained furious. Because this message has become just one of the latest ways for scammers to deceive players. The attackers leave links to bots that allegedly give millions of coins. And they also hide behind coin withdrawal services and steal Telegram accounts. In general, the devil works hard, but the Hamster Kombat scammers work even harder.
Either the popularity of Hamster Kombat, or fraudulent activity (or maybe all together) They have become a matter of concern for government officials around the world. Iran condemned Hamster Kombat and called the game a “tool of the West” to distract from local elections. In Uzbekistan, players may go to the prison for potential withdrawal of coins, and in Russia they want to ban the game altogether. A few months ago, the first case of admission to a psychiatric hospital due to Hamster Kombat was recorded in Russia. And it was a teenager.
If it is not scammers and states that will be the death of Hamster Kombat, then it will be the community of the game. It's not enough to create just a huge community around the project. It is important to take into account his interests so that one day you do not incite him to your own product.
It all started with the idea of the developers to implement a system of combo cards, the purchase of which is aimed at pumping the user's exchange. Some cards were opened on the condition that the user invited friends to the game. On the one hand, the team only wanted to gain an audience in this way as soon as possible. And as we can see, they did it. But on the other hand, the vast majority of game users simply cannot invite the number of friends that the game requests for the sake of some cards, because they are not influencers or large channels. If not for the decision of the team to take into account the profit per hour for airdrop, perhaps many would not have paid attention to this. However, Hamster Kombat and its entire team have been heavily criticized for excessive social pressure.
But the team doesn't care about its community. And this proves her recent actions. As the airdrop approaches, the developers have introduced new cards... advertising bookmakers. Why ruin your reputation with such partnerships? Or is it more important for the team to get more benefits for themselves? For a very narrow circle of the project?
The bookmaker's advertising in Hamster Kombat has become nothing more than a sale to the audience and support for gambling on the part of Hamster Kombat. And this is bad Vibe, bad reputation.
And users are so passionate about the idea of simple earnings (which there are no guarantees) that they do not notice either contradictory advertising or more important things for any cryptocurrency project. For example, tokenomics. Hamster Kombat has it, but it doesn't seem to. In the remote tokenomics, only 100 million coins have been allocated for airdrop. We talked about how many coins players will receive and what the price will be when listing, in a separate article. But here we would like to emphasize the depressing results that await all 250 million users. Was it worth wasting your precious time on Hamster Kombat in this case?
As we understand it, scammers, the team itself and advertisers want to cash in on ordinary players. Or someone else? The hamster mania began to reach the point of absurdity. Prices for conventional percussion massagers have risen on marketplaces. The product description contains a short “suitable for playing Hamster Kombat". And in Russia, St. Petersburg, the sale of craft beer with the image of Hamster Kombat has started. But the beer won't suddenly taste better and the massager won't get better.
We would like to believe that in this madness, where the game unexpectedly turned, there is a glimmer of light and the vast majority of users soberly look at the activity around Hamster Kombat. On the one hand, the latest "VTSIOM" data shows that more than half of Russians have not even heard of Hamster Kombat. However, the survey was conducted among adult users. Unfortunately, there are no age restrictions in Hamster Kombat. And a huge mass of the audience falls on teenagers.
People are massively losing interest in the game. The mechanics are starting to get complicated and annoying. The prospects of airdrop do not hold the audience. And gaming innovations aimed at weeding out players with a potential airdrop have greatly provoked users. Last week, a puzzle-like mini-game appeared in the game. In the allotted 30 seconds, you need to guess it in order to move the key to the keyhole. At the moment, it remains unclear what these keys are for and whether they will affect airdrop. The community is speculating that the keys will unlock once-missed cards. Under one of the last posts on X, users expressed their indignation, emphasizing that the team would eventually lose its community with such decisions.
Some condemn the developers for such limited time given to solve the puzzle, while others condemn them for the fact that a fun and simple game suddenly became stressful.
Sasha Plotvinov, the founder of Notcoin, once said that in order for such games to continue to exist and please the community, it is necessary to move away from the tap-to-earn concept towards usefulness. The creators of Hamster Kombat, on the contrary, believed in themselves too much, stating the duration of the game direction. But the latest innovations in the game seem to prove the opposite.
Conclusion
The hype around Hamster Kombat now recalls the days when everyone was talking about digital sneakers and NFT. Judging by how these trends are responding among people now, Hamster Kombat has the same future ahead. "Hamster" and dozens of similar games are just a passing trend in cryptocurrency, deftly playing on the FOMO of ordinary people.
The prospect of getting pennies for each player's valuable time is great. Staying in the game is boring because of the “unique” gameplay. If the player does not enjoy the gameplay, he is wasting his time.
The creators of the game are trying their best to keep their audience, but judging by the latest activity around the project, the team is no longer able to maintain the relevance of its concept.
