WTF Are These Telegram Games And Do You Need One?

If you’re paying attention, you probably know what I’m talking about. What you might not know is that these games are amassing millions of users in a span of a weeks, with the example of Hamster Kombat at 239M. Yeah, you read that right. They’re not just getting all of web3 attention, but they’re onboarding millions into crypto.

While the broader crypto market is looking bearish, this one category seems to be booming and capturing everyones attention. And not just web3 enthusiasts, they are onboarding 10’s of Millions of web2 users in a matter of weeks.

And even though this all started with basic spam tapping games that could be exploited by bot farms, that’s just the tip of the iceberg of how projects are leveraging telegram’s mini app technology to build loyal communities and drive real user acquisition to their main products.

As a founder, you might be asking yourself: how long will this last? isn’t it just for pre-TGE airdrops? will it work for my project, and how?

I’m going to answer all of these questions here.

First of all, let’s understand what is making these games go viral.

Telegram is solving the accessibility issue by meeting users where they’re at. Telegram is a social platform with 900M users, where they get together and communicate. Now they can also play games, with their friends, without ever leaving the platform. And now they can also seamlessly create a crypto wallet without friction, making it easy to onboard new users to web3 AND your project.

On top of that, social incentives to invite and play with friends are a battle-tested strategy to get exponential user growth. Rewarding users with improved game experience and other benefits is a proven method for acquisition, and the fact that it can all be done within one platform makes it pretty much frictionless.

But how long will this last? If we’re talking about just having people tap on a jpeg to farm an airdrop, not very long and it won’t drive real community growth. But that was just the first proof of concept for telegram apps, there are many more use cases that engage the audience.

You can also think of it as a lead magnet to your project, the top of funnel that generates the attention, and then convert a % of them into your core product. Even if you’re a gaming studio developing a full fledged game, you can create a scaled down or demo version of it for telegram, get users to get a taste and attract them to your full game.

Although these have mainly been used for pre-TGE airdrops, a telegram mini app can be just as impactful for established projects looking to increase their community engagement and grow their user base.

You can still create entertainment for your community and a reward ecosystem post launch, and i’ll share some examples on how you can do this in a sec.

One of the main concerns i’ve heard is that “we’re not a gaming project” or “we’re a technical product, this doesn’t fit our audience”. I’ll clear that up real quick. If you have have been in web3 for a while and you’re a founder, you can probably agree with me that community is KEY to drive your project’s growth.

Just like you were creative to come up with a use case for blockchain technology, the same process applies here - telegram mini apps are the technology, it can be used in a million different ways to build something of value to your project and community. It’s about gamifying the experience of your brand.

To prove it to you, here are just a few use cases that you can tap into:

Puzzles - Think something like wordle, candy crush, memory match or jigsaw. All of them can be adapted to your branding and concept.

Educational - You can incentivize users to learn about your product through quizzes or “who wants to be a millionaire” style experiences. Instead of just tapping on a screen for hours, you can choose to reward behaviours that drive adoption.

Arcade and Endless Runner - games like subway surfers, fruit ninja or piano tiles, where there’s a randomness to the patterns which prevent bot farming. The logic and experience from successful mobile games can be adapted to fit your project concept and theme.

It’s not a matter of “will this work for my project?”, it’s “how will I leverage the technology to create a gamified experience that will attract new users and engage my community?”.

If you’d like our help to answer this question or to build your telegram mini app, schedule a free discovery call!

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