Crypto bros have discovered idle games, and the results are incredibly boring

Have you ever wanted to tap mindlessly on Elon Musk's face for hours on end with the vague promise that it might, one day, make you some cash? No? Well, millions of people have been doing just that over the past few months as part of the latest craze to hit the world of crypto; a collection of Cookie Clicker-style games on the messaging platform Telegram.

This craze started earlier this year with the launch of NotCoin, an incredibly simple app on Telegram where you would tap on a virtual coin, as you would the cookie in Cookie Clicker. It was simple enough that it was inoffensive, but it lacked any of Cookie Clicker's charm.

Despite this, the game racked up 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-game. These token giveaways, known as airdrops in the crypto world, are often done when a new cryptocurrency is launched to generate hype when it finally goes on sale in the open market and, in the process, boost the price. With millions of $NOT tokens given away to players, the crypto reached a peak price of $0.02896 shortly after the airdrop, meaning some players, had 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 significantly less at $0.007754.

Obviously, this success resulted in copycats, hoping to cash in with their own tap-to-earn games. One such copycat was the Banana game that rose to the top of Steam a few months ago, while hundreds of others have since appeared on Telegram, trying to capitalise on the large crypto community who already use 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 turn that incredible reach and user attention into gaming."

Now, the market leader is Hamster Kombat, a game where you're a hamster who runs a crypto exchange. You tap on your hamster like you would the coin in NotCoin, but you can also reinvest the in-game currency you earn into extra features for your imaginary exchange that will provide you passive income when the game is closed. While it is yet to launch its own crypto token, an airdrop has been announced for 26th September 2024 with millions of tokens set to be handed out to players.

Hamster Kombat's development team claims it has over 300 million players, and it has become so popular in some countries that the deputy chief of Iran's military criticised 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 destabilising the entire economy, the potential promise of earning crypto tokens for playing a game is hard to ignore.

"For Hamster Kombat, when I look at the player base, it's huge," Sten tells me, who's a player from Kenya who's already earned 540 $NOT tokens and is now playing Hamster Kombat. "So [it will] probably [have] a higher market cap and with some hype $HMSTR can pump several X [increase in value several times]. I believe $HMSTR is gonna be huge, that's why I play it. Upon listing, I'm gonna buy more."

"I haven't earned much so far," says Jerome, a player from Nigeria who only recently started playing these games, but is already playing eight different titles in the hopes of making some money. One of them is called Lost Dogs, a Telegram game where you gamble on which of the three story options will be the second most chosen by players each day. "Just [from] Lost Dogs, I withdrew 0.84 $NOT yesterday. I'm hoping to earn tokens in the airdrops, I hope to earn as much as $150."

Research from the Global Living Wage Coalition suggests a living wage in areas of Kenya could be as low as $237 USD per month, meaning the $4.18 Sten could sell his NOT tokens for at the time of writing isn't a trivial amount of money. In Nigeria, the same organisation suggests a living wage could be as low as $146 USD per month, so if Jerome hits his targets it could be a significant payout for him.

"Incentives are important, without a doubt," says Lai. "This extends to all aspects of human behaviour, as we're all motivated by a mix of extrinsic and intrinsic factors. Tokens can significantly accelerate community growth by creating viral loops and driving behaviour. However, that's not enough to sustain a community at scale. It's also about clever marketing, consistently delivering on promises and staying true to the community. Gameplay matters too. The ideal combination is fun gameplay and aligned incentives. When done right, tokens are the foundation for sustainable long-term growth built on loyalty and fun."

That last part is the sticking point for most of these apps; none of them are much fun. Some try to implement marginally different mechanics, such as Catizen (which is not to be confused with Herocraft's colony sim Catizens). Here, you swipe to combine cats of the same level in your cat café to make them more valuable. Others simply change what you tap on, with X Empire featuring the aforementioned cartoon Elon Musk to bash in the face.

These are fairly mindless apps, ones that barely qualify as a game and offer little more than making the numbers go up. Even the charm of Cookie Clicker, with its pleasing visuals and potentially unlimited playtime, is missing - often replaced with mobile game-style barriers designed to keep you coming back every few hours, or spend money.

But not being fun is probably the least offensive part of these games. In a quest to expand the player base, almost every one of these Telegram games I've tried will reward you for inviting friends to join the game, with some even locking progress behind it.

Pixel Tap, another popular tap game, outright prevents you from progressing past level three unless you invite at least one friend - and by the time the airdrop rolled around, level three wasn't enough to be eligible for any tokens. But for every friend you did invite, you got 5% of the in-game currency they earned, and 1% of anything players they invited made, essentially creating something indicative of a virtual pyramid scheme, or MLM (multi-level marketing), that eventually paid out crypto tokens to those at the top. The Pixel Tap crypto reached a high of $0.0977 shortly after it launched, but at time of writing is now worth $0.006405, less than a tenth of that peak.

Schemes like this are common, while microtransactions that are clearly pay-to-win by giving certain advantages are also present. Catizen, for example, will sell you an upgrade where any cats that arrive in your café are automatically combined with others of the same level, removing the one actual mechanic it has. That requires 3900 of its premium currency, which will cost you about $13. Whether that purchase will pay off when the game's token launches remains to be seen.

"For Catizen, in order to enable the automatic mode of [combining] kittens, I spent some money," a player from Singapore who wished to remain anonymous tells me. Previously, they'd managed to get some airdrops from the Solana Saga phone, a Web-3 based mobile phone that occasionally airdrops tokens to owners. "Therefore, I thought maybe I can get some airdrops here too," they say. "It's totally fine if there is no airdrop, [but] I will be very happy if there will be a small amount of airdrop."

In an interview with Eurogamer, chairman of the Catizen Foundation Tim Wong revealed to me that as of 27th July 2024, the game has made $16,875,769 in crypto from in-game purchases since it launched in March. To its credit, Catizen has also committed to giving 1% of its revenue to charities helping cats. A $100,000 donation was recently made to PETA, but backlash from the community regarding the charity's history prompted them to pause the ongoing partnership and look at potential other charities to work with instead.

For many players around the world, these games offer the promise of future riches. Another NotCoin-style token launch could net some players the equivalent of multiple month's salary if they play for long enough. But currently only a handful of these games have successfully launched tokens, and almost all of them have lost a significant amount of their value since becoming publicly tradeable, with most having little to no use other than being bought and sold. Some games promise future expansions, or new games in the same ecosystem, but few have executed on this so far, leaving most airdropped tokens fairly useless.

"Catizen's user base will continually evolve," says Wong. "What I mean is, some users who joined solely for the airdrop might sell their tokens and leave the community after the Token Generation Event. This is unavoidable. However, there will also be individuals who recognize the long-term value of $CATI and choose to become part of our community. These new members will likely be of higher quality and more committed. The airdrop is merely the beginning of opening the entire Catizen ecosystem to the community."

Getting paid to play video games is the dream for many, and now millions of people are getting that experience through tap-to-earn games. But the predatory and insidious tactics used to bring players in on the promise of future riches - to say nothing of the systems that seem to rig the payouts against those at the bottom - feels like a bad first iteration of the idea. One day, someone might figure out how to make a game you can get paid for playing that is fun and fair for everyone. But these Telegram games almost certainly aren't it.