How Much Did Hamster Kombat Earn and Why Are Users Unhappy?

The dust settled after the first season of the Hamster Kombat project was completed, and it's a good time to discuss the HMSTR airdrop results. Hamster remains the most massive Telegram mini app at the moment. However, unlike Notcoin, Dogs, Catizen, and other analogs, the community's attention to airdrop results is rather critical.

In this article, I want to explain how the Hamster Kombat game business works—how much the community members earn and possible project earnings.

In the Beginning…

Hamster Kombat was launched in the spring of 2024 after the success of Notcoin. The distinctive feature of the game is an interesting story. The user can try himself in the role of an entrepreneur and CEO of a crypto exchange. To develop the exchange, you need to invest in various improvement cards, click on the hamster, and perform tasks.

With Notcoin, Hamster became one of the first "clickers" launched in Telegram. Hamster coins were awarded for regular user activity in the app.

By mid-summer of this year, the game had gained more than 239 million users, and Pavel Durov even wrote about it on his Telegram channel. After that, the number of users had grown to 300 million.

The project community had been expecting the token drop for a long time - and finally, it was announced in September. However, the criteria for the drop caused a severe wave of criticism - people spent many hours in the game every day and they say this activity was rewarded with a few dollars only.

What Do We Know About Hamster Founders?

The game's owners are not directly disclosed. However, several media outlets have published articles linking three Russians—Eduard Gurinovich, Alexander Zelenshchikov, and Alexander Pasechnik—to the game. Previously, they were engaged in developing other software solutions, such as the social network Yappi.

According to the media, Eduard Gurinovich is also the founder of the game developer Arenum. The domain hamsterkombat.com was registered in June this year from Arenum's work email.

Why Is the Community Unhappy?

By the poll results, which I conducted on my social networks, the Hamster Kombat team has changed the drop criteria - if Notcoin converted game balance into tokens to everyone equally, Hamster gave out approximately the same amount of tokens to players with different game balances and those who did not attract referrals received a comparable amount of coins for $5-20 regardless of the time spent in the game. At the same time, increased rewards were given to referrals.

Community members claim that the Hamster team previously promised to reward players who regularly logged into the app and collected cards. In addition, the app excluded 2.3 million players from the drop for "cheating" and zeroed out their balances. Finally, only 131 million of the 300+ million members of the first season participated in the drop. At the moment, according to TON.APP data, the number of wallets with HMSTR is even less—only 111 million holders.

The Hamster listing passed on September 26, with large crypto exchanges as partners: Binance, Bybit, Bitget, etc. However, its results did not please—at the pre-market, the HMSTR coin was valued at $0.01, but after the token was listed, the price fell more than two times to $0.045.

How Many Basic Players Get?

At the initial price, drop members who did not participate in the referral programs received less than Notcoin only $5-20. And even other referral program participants just over $100-200. This is data from a survey I did on social media. At the same time in Notcoin, the numbers were much higher - $100-200 for many ordinary drop participants and $800-2000 for those who actively encouraged referrals to the app.

Why Didn't the Drop Meet Expectations?

Critics accuse the app's administration of stimulating players' daily activity, including promising to reward them on the drop and then moving away from this principle. This is debatable, especially since although players spent their time playing the game, they didn't invest their money there and Hamster Kombat didn't specify a clear reward amount.

Nevertheless, it is clear why the daily activity of mini-app participants was stimulated. The game earns exactly on advertising in the application and regular fulfillment of tasks by users. It is possible to distinguish several sources of income and even approximately calculate the advertising revenue:

• Partnership contracts with advertising in the application
• Views on the game’s YouTube channels
• Advertising in the Telegram channel of the game

How Much Money Could YouTube Give?

Profit from advertising on YouTube is the easiest to calculate. The main channel Hamster Kombat now has 1.215 million views. There is also a new channel for the game in English and 15 more channels in other languages - Vietnamese, Turkish, Spanish, and others. Combined, they have racked up about 1,600,000,000,000 views. YouTube pays about $0.01 to $0.03 per 1,000 views.

Possible profits may exceed $16 to $50 million. However, Hamster likely earned even less - it is known that the revenue for YouTube in June amounted to about $5.2 million based on existing calculations. By the way, this is roughly comparable to the number of views of the main channel in June - 544,000,000.

By the way, June was the month when Hamster's YouTube audience was most active. You can see the following graph with the number of views by week from the beginning of June to the end of September on the Hamster main YouTube channel.

Hamster's other YouTube channels are much smaller, and their revenue share is insignificant. So, it is unlikely that YouTube's revenue for June, July, August, and September will exceed $20 million maximum.

Earnings in Telegram and Other Sources of Income Hamster

Hamster also has a large Telegram channel. From Telegram Ads, it can earn about 0.1 TON per 1000 views. In total, there were 307 posts in the channel, and the average number of views - 26 million people. I even inflated this figure to 50 million and still number of projected earnings is low - about 1.5 million TON or $7.5 million in advertising revenue.

It is also known that Hamster had several advertising contracts and partnerships, one of the largest being with the gambling Winline for about $100,000. We can roughly calculate the income from 100 partnerships at $10 million.

Conclusion: Hamster Kombat Didn't Turn a Big Profit

So, Hamster could earn $10 million from partnerships, $7.5 from Telegram ads, and no more than $20 million from YouTube. Thus, according to a very rough estimate with several assumptions and rounding in favor of the game, its revenue for the summer of 2024 did not exceed $50 million.

The Hamster Kombat channel estimated the number of drop participants to be 131 million people, and the TON App website lists the number of HMSTR holders as 111 million. According to various community and media reports, ordinary drop participants were given $5-10 each. And the total market cap, even at the current price, is even more—$247 million.

In general, as I was told by sources among market makers, the amount of liquidity in USDT needed to maintain the token price at the moment is approximately $20-50 million. You also have to take into account the operational overhead for the game.

Based on the data I've studied, Hamster's profit margins can be much smaller than disappointed drop participants think. This is also because, having gathered such a large audience, the Hamster Kombat team didn’t use other effective monetization methods, such as selling in-game items. By comparison, with a much smaller audience, Catizen made $31 million from in-game item sales alone.

After studying these figures, I hypothesize that the game earned little during the first season, despite its great popularity, and this explains the low rewards according to the community. I took this story apart with you because I think Telegram mini apps, although so far most of them are games - this is an important trend in global crypto adoption.

If you want more crypto insights, you can get regular updates on my Telegram channel. You can also find an overview of crypto regulation and options for nomads in different countries here.