‘Hamster Kombat’ Telegram Game Hits 100 Million Players—Here's When the Token Is Coming

On Wednesday, the Hamster Kombat team announced that it has drawn 100 million players into the Telegram mini app to date, blasting upwards from a claimed mark of 60 million players last Friday.

That’s an enormous amount of players for any game, let alone one that is set to have a crypto token in the near future. There’s very little friction to start playing, to be sure, and the game itself is built around a simple clicking mechanism.

It’s not difficult to get people to hop in and start playing Hamster Kombat, though whether they stick around is another story. For now, screenshots of data shared by Hamster Kombat point to something in the range of 40-45 million daily active users (DAU), though a large chunk of that may be people playing for the very first time given the influx of new users.

Hamster Kombat is also seeing significant social media attention, giving some credence to the claimed player base stats.

The game now has the single largest Telegram channel on the messaging app with over 27 million subscribers, or more than three times that of the official Notcoin announcements channel, for example. It has also racked up nearly 17 million YouTube subscribers, and has almost six million Twitter followers as well.

Why are people tapping their screens incessantly and operating a hamster-led fictional crypto exchange? Most players are likely in it for the eventual token airdrop, given how well Notcoin—its spiritual predecessor—landed for players recently. And now we have a target for when the token might drop.

In a Twitter Spaces held with the TON Foundation earlier this week, a Hamster Kombat team member who went by “Hamster Girl” said that the current token listing target is in July—though that could change based on various factors. A TON Foundation representative separately confirmed to Decrypt’s GG on Thursday that the game’s team is aiming for July.

“It can be a little bit sooner, it can be a little bit later, because there's obviously different moving parts involved including compliance [and] negotiations,” Hamster Girl said on the Twitter Spaces.

Notcoin’s token listing, for example, was delayed for about a month. It was originally scheduled to happen in parallel with the Bitcoin halving on April 20, but just days before the planned drop, developer Open Builders pushed back the NOT launch. It then missed an end-of-April target before finally launching on May 16.

But the NOT launch proved to be well worth the wait for players, particularly those who held onto their tokens—it’s up 350% in the last two weeks and is now one of the top 60 cryptocurrencies overall by market cap at $2.15 billion.

Hamster Kombat players are undoubtedly hoping for similar buzz once their token is available. And Toncoin, the native token of The Open Network, may be benefitting from the Hamster Kombat buzz too. Now the 10th most-valuable cryptocurrency by market cap, TON hit a new all-time high price of $7.76 early Wednesday.

And for players who enjoy the tapping gameplay, fear not: Unlike Notcoin, Hamster Kombat apparently doesn’t plan to pause the gameplay once the token launch nears.

“Obviously, the game will never stop,” said Hamster Girl. “It will not stop after the listing. It will keep rolling, and a lot more mechanics are coming, a lot more cards [...] and a lot more incentive to invite even more friends and play along with each other.”