Telegram Games Are Fastly Becoming Red Flags 🚩

• My personal experience with a Telegram game’s founding team.

• Telegram gaming is flawed- what began as an experiment lacks concrete use cases to thrive.

• Founders are holding on to vanity metrics to create their own ambitions which majorly benefits them and leaves players unrewarded.

Ever since Notcoin gained popularity, followed by Tapswap, and then Hamster Kombat swept the waves with even more virality, millions of non-crypto natives were subtly onboarded into crypto.

The wave seems to be gradually fading. There are rumors that Hamster Kombat's claim of 300 million players is exaggerated, and the team behind the project has a history of dishonesty, allegedly having rug-pulled investors in the past with a previous project.

Read also: Telegram Games Have Boring Marketing Strategies

Another reason why the positive sentiments towards Telegram games have changed is due to low fulfilled expectations tied to airdrops. Many players who invested their time in projects like Pixelverse were disappointed at how ‘unfair’ the airdrop was. Now, this drives a signal to players.

As a proponent of mass adoption in crypto, I also understand that many things can go wrong in the early stages, and bad actors can easily exploit the inexperience of newcomers.

Notwithstanding, Hamster Kombat has carved a name for itself and has risen to become that Telegram game that is mostly used for reference. So when new Telegram games aspire to go viral, no doubt they admire Hamster’s ‘success story’ even though the project is yet to pivot to the point where it offers utility.

I noticed this when speaking with the team behind a 2-month-old gaming project on Telegram. They were eager to gain traction on their app for the sole purpose of enriching their pockets instead of going through the community route.

Here's the Story

Last week, I had a call with the team behind a Telegram gaming project.

Their value proposition includes a unique feature that goes beyond the typical tap-to-earn model. The game has a sticky feature for creators to create some form of degen-related content and then earn rewards in-app for their creativity.

But then, I could clearly spot a walking red flag. The team was prioritizing what should have come later. This to me sounded very ridiculous and I'll explain why.

• The timeline they proposed to attract buyers for their token was unrealistic.

They planned to do this within just a few weeks. Take Tapswap, for example—the game has been in its 'mining phase' for six months, and the team is still carefully planning a token launch event that truly benefits their community and likely includes a strong retention strategy. This process takes time; it's not just a perspire-to-aspire kinda thing. Especially since Telegram gaming is still in its early stages, despite the 'success' of Notcoin.

• The team doesn’t understand how Telegram games work.

Currently, Telegram games earn revenue primarily through the traffic they generate, unlike Web2 or Web3 games which have multiple monetization avenues. For this project, being largely interested in making quick cash, I expect them to focus on driving traffic to their game and leverage monetized content platforms like YouTube, similar to how Hamster Kombat does it. But they weren't interested in going through this route.

• Wrong idea about marketing

While discussing with the CEO, I found out he had a shabby idea about marketing which I've paraphrased to mean:

“No other Telegram game is doing what we are doing so the project should be able to market itself. We should skip building a community because that takes time, rather we should simply get people to buy our tokens because we don't think the players we have can afford to buy tokens.”

Obviously, the team has a clear vision of degens as their target audience and not necessarily onboarding the masses. While this is not a wrong ideal customer profile, there are slim chances of breaking through such a competitive market by merely just having a ‘great idea.’

In marketing, a smaller competitor can often outperform their rivals by having a stronger strategy. It's more about how you say it than what you're saying.

They also expressed their desire to attract quick buyers who would stay long-term—a brazen irony! I did my best to make them understand the impossibility of this.

Skipping community building and expecting to have loyal supporters for your project is pure fiction—a mere daydream. It's like shielding your plants from sunlight and rain, yet still expecting them to thrive and remain lush and green.

Telegram gaming is still in its early phase, despite the number of games already available. You have the opportunity to stand out by breaking the jinx—being transparent with your approach and quickly pivoting when necessary for the benefit of your community members. Send an email to [email protected] to get started.