Game marketing is changing, thanks to Hamster Kombat, a tapping mini-game on Telegram that has been downloaded more than 300 million times since March. It took only 73 days for Hamster Kombat to reach its first 100 million users.

Traditional marketing tactics are losing their power when it comes to attracting the attention of target audiences, said Tavia Wong, chief marketing officer at Credbull, a small private credit company in Asia with a dozen employees. The age of the viral game is back, at least on one platform. And many are starting to copy the formula like PiP World, Bondex, Gamee and Liithos.

In an interview with GamesBeat, she said that Web3 tap-and-earn games like Hamster Kombat are the unexpected inspiration for marketing professionals, and she believes every business can learn from their success, as well as how to leverage it for translating hype into revenue. Will it be a lifeline for Web3 games, which have struggled to get mainstream acceptance?

“When I first saw Hamster Kombat, I thought it was quite silly. It was going viral on Telegram and I thought it probably wasn’t going to go anywhere,” Wong said. “”But low and behold, the community has been growing really, really quickly. It’s one of the most successful games on Telegram, where there’s a cute hamster that a lot of people can just tap away on.”

She added, “As a marketer, it really makes you sit up and go, ‘Okay, what’s there? Why is the community going so quickly?’ And it keeps growing.”

Hamster Kombat is a tap-to-earn crypto game on Telegram, where you click or tap on the screen. Players take the role of a CEO at a cryptocurrency exchange. The creators said in May 2024 that they would launch a token on The Open Network (TON), a Layer-1 blockchain originally created by Telegram. Now the development is being handled externally by the community.

In the game, players start as a bald hamster under contract to be a CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange. Users can tap the hamster avatar to generate in-game coins, but the main gameplay mechanic involves purchasing exchange upgrades to increase the hourly profit. You can earn coins by referring friends to play the game on Telegram or by finishing harder in-game tasks like solving a daily Morse code cipher.

It’s popular for the moment. But things can change. Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France and is being held on charges that the platform doesn’t do enough to protect users from fraud, terror and other negative influences. It’s not clear how this will affect Telegram.

At a marketing agency, Wong ran ad campaigns for more than eight years and she sold the agency to a Fortune 500 company. She then joined an AI firm and later looked into crypto. Her current company Credbull is looking to engage with the retail community — the enthusiasts who will pay attention to such “tap and earn” games. So she really wanted to find out what was driving this game forward.

“One of the main reasons behind it is incentives (check out our recent story on the Benjamin app), and it’s almost like going to a casino. It’s a little bit of a gambling effect because people tap. They get more points when they refer their friends to the game, and they also get points to rank on the leaderboard. So they have to do it like a daily streak,” Wong said.

It could be viewed as addictive like gambling. Or like other more benign habits.

“Think about it like Duolingo. So every day you have to kind of log in and they are cool sound effects,” Wong said. “There are things that really keep you engaged within the app. And there are leaderboards to show you where you rank, so that you really don’t want to go down because it affects how many points you’re going to get. And it becomes this crazy, crazy game. And you would think that a user is probably going to get a huge amount of tokens or rewards — a financial incentive for being so active. But the fact is that most of this project has not even launched or released yet. So everybody is playing in anticipation of a future reward.”

It’s like any other speculative bubble in that respect. There’s a lot of word of mouth, and people are just really engaged within those communities, Wong said.

This bodes well for marketers because they lost virality after Facebook shutdown the game spam and after Apple hobbled targeted ads in favor of user privacy.

“It’s a very good thing for marketers because these games, as we get more sophisticated, can also introduce the idea of clans. And these clans compete against each other to see who gets the most,” Wong said. “That makes you feel a sense of belonging to a bigger club.” And the wining gets bigger.

Soon enough, there’s a domino effect that fuels the game’s momentum.

Wong believes that Hamster Kombat leverages growth hacking. She said the game’s explosive growth isn’t a coincidence. It’s a winning formula fueled by social media buzz, word-of-mouth, and clever referral programs that create a self-sustaining wave of new users. Every victory, every success story, and every shared experience attract more players to the action. It’s a domino effect fueling the game’s momentum.

It’s also tapping into gamification on Telegram, a platform that doesn’t have a ton of hardcore games. She thinks Web3 games like Hamster Kombat are exploding with easy-to-play, gamified experiences that seamlessly integrate with crypto.

Telegram happens to have a lot of crypto fans, particularly those who are concerned about traditional government that they’re willing to put their money into cryptocurrency. Telegram also has a lot of people who therefore have their own cryptocurrency wallets — something that Hamster Kombat leverages.

Wong believes this is the future of user engagement, and it’s not just for gamers anymore. Think gamified loyalty programs or interactive marketing campaigns. Tap into reward-seeking behavior, a natural competitive spirit, and the classic fear of missing out to incentivize potential customers to engage with your communications. 

Developers can still leverage network effects on Telegram, as it’s like the old Facebook before it cracked down on viral messaging. Being strategic about choosing a crypto native messaging app to launch a relevant tap and earn game or other gamified experiences is key to leverage the large user bases of apps like Telegram, Wong said.

For the moment, players are embracing the quirkiness of Hamster Kombat. These mini-games are fun, quirky, and full of surprises. Forget dry press releases. Think interactive challenges, gamified product features, or even a mascot that embodies your brand’s personality.

And community is everything, Wong said. Look at Hamster Kombat’s massive social media following, consisting of 300 million users; 13 million followers on Twitter/X, and their YouTube account of tens of millions subscribers. Web3 games foster strong communities through shared gameplay and rewards. Can your marketing strategy create a similar level of engagement? 

It’s important not to measure engagement just for the sake of reporting on success. Marketers need to ask themselves how they can harness the traffic and attention they’re receiving from successful campaigns to translate it into users, she said.

By making gamified experiences highly relevant to the end solution, companies can not only educate users on their solution, for instance as Monzo did by providing insights on spending habits, but by directly pushing communications aimed at customer onboarding within the experience itself and continually rewarding them with bonus points for following the user journey.  

Each day, millions of new users are joining Hamster Kombat, making it one of the fastest-growing digital services in the world, according to Telegram. We’ll see what happens once the Hamster Kombat team mints its token on TON.

I asked Wong what’s the difference between this and regular loyalty programs that people are creating.

“With regular loyalty programs, you come up with a program, you try to engage your existing community, but people don’t really care much about your loyalty program unless you’re a really big brand,” she said. “So how do you build something like that from scratch? So I think the key is to go where the traffic is. Go out on Telegram, for example, where these tap to earn games are so popular. You can tap into the millions of people already using Telegram.”

Hamster Kombat is a hypercasual game where everybody can play. Brands can start moving in on the action to reach the players with various kinds of ads. The people are already there. Credbull launched its own tap-and-earn game that got off the ground.

“We’re leveraging on the hype of this, and then putting in all the psychology of good marketing and selling, where it’s like social rush,” she said. “You have speculation and future rewards and then create surprises within the game in a very simple way. It leads to really explosive in growth.”

“What’s cool is that the the benefits of this go past marketing. So our product team has also been loving tis as they can launch small product features and test them within the game. You can use it to test offers, product features and see how the crowd responds to it,” she said. “It becomes your focus group for your product team. You get immediate feedback on whether users love it or not.”

Wong compares this time, where the number of games is in the hundreds, to the early days of Facebook. She predicts the brands will come in. Credbull has experimented with its own Telegram game in various ways.

“I think there is a parallel with the game and metaverse brands, like how they want to engage with retail consumers and so they created shops on the metaverse,” she said.

These brands go where someone is succeeding in getting attention.

“I wouldn’t underestimate how effective Telegram has been at onboading users,” she said. “There are so many messaging apps out there. But Telegram is one of the top in the world.”

Nothing lasts forever. But when you can leverage popularity for a purpose, you can grow.

When you’re planning loyalty campaigns, you’re trying to get people interested in the first place and then to retain that interest in the long run, she said. Big social media companies have studied what it takes to make people play. The details get very granular. Games like Angry Birds had memorable sounds that could serve as psychological triggers within your brain to keep playing, she said. A huge team comes together to understand the psychology, game mechanics, the tokenomics and more to start social engagement. In the case of Telegram, it’s so brainless that you create a game to tap.

The good question is at what point does the game with weak gameplay give way to a more sophisticated game with much better gameplay. The game can be simple, but it has enough sophistication to keep people playing. Gamification apps focus on motivating the player to stay engaged and use social techniques to retain them.

I noted one triple-A game company, Liithos, wanted to make an open world game. It couldn’t raise money in the current environment, so it took one piece of the intellectual property and made a character out of it. Then it launched it as a viral clicker game. It’s called Clickbait, a satirical game called Clickbait as part of its No One Is Safe franchise.

It’s trying to draw attention to its bigger mission and games through the Clickbait game, which revolves around mischievous chatbot called RantCPU. and it focuses on the anxiety around AI and a world where humanity has destroyed itself. It’s a new transmedia property set to launch as a game on Steam, a comic book series from Scout, and trading cards.

Wong noted some game companies raise money directly from the community. With NFTs, sometimes that worked and sometimes it went horribly wrong, with scammers stealing money.

“When I saw this tap and earn game, as a CMO, to be honest, I dismissed it because I was like, it’s so silly. I played so much better production games from big gaming houses. Why am I spending my time playing on this? But when I looked at the metrics, they were growing like crazy,” she said.

Wong added, “I understand why it’s so popular now, because it’s using all the effects of the psychology.”