Guest post by David Fox, founder of Double Coconut — a design and development studio that has delivered hit mobile and web games for partners such as EA Sports, WB Games, Microsoft Casual Games, and more.

In an ever-chaotic gaming business, Telegram seems to finally be a platform where a studio can launch with self-determination and have a real shot at a profitable game. Catizen — one of the top Telegram success stories — earned $25 million in revenue as of September 2024 with over 1 million paying users. The game Hamster Kombat hit 300 million users. And these aren’t even among the tippy-top grossing apps, per the Telegram charts:

It’s no secret that Telegram is crazy hot, with 950 million monthly users, 25 million dailies, and growth still shooting upward (as of Q3 2024). Why is “just another messaging app” getting so popular?

• True focus on privacy and minding your own business — chat is automatically encrypted and never logged

• Slick and fast! Feels as smooth as Meta’s WhatsApp or Apple’s iChat

• Solid mobile chat app with a desktop version that keeps conversations in perfect synch

• Minimal but well-crafted features like animated stickers, easy group chatting w/ sub-topics, etc.

All of this leads to a superb “network effect” — the more people that spend time chatting on Telegram, the more their friends and business colleagues need to join up and engage.

Unlike many other messaging platforms, a good chunk of Telegram users are game-oriented. In fact, a reported 20% of Telegram users engage with games. So let’s dive deeper and understand what does (and doesn’t) work.

Gaming – Always a Killer First App

Earlier this year, Telegram released a clean open platform where publishers can deploy “Telegram Mini Apps” (TMAs) without much fuss or gatekeeping. Successful games soon followed. A brief rundown of current Telegram hits include:

Hamster Kombat

This idle game is the most popular gaming app on Telegram, with almost 100 million MAU! It’s a simple but very slickly designed “business sim” where you build your own ‘crypto exchange’, with a hamster as CEO. Like any clicker, you need to tap like crazy, upgrade different characters and side-hustles, earn more and more money, and spend your money to upgrade even further.

The gimmick — leading to many bots playing alongside the actual humans — is that the publisher will airdrop their most dedicated players some $HMSTR tokens (worth real $) every so often.

Notcoin

Another simple clicker game where the player accumulates “Notcoins” which can eventually be converted into the $NOT token (now a top-100 cryptocurrency that can be traded on places like Binance).

Catizen

Catizen is a true phenomena, hitting 34 million players. It’s a merge game that’s actually kinda fun: Get a random deal of cats, merge pairs of kitties to higher levels, then try to fit as many high-level cats on the grid as you can to generate idle income. It’s simple but endless – the better your level of cats, the more idle money you bring in.

As with most other Telegram hits, the promise is a big payout: In-game currency you earn can be exchanged for the $CATI crypto when you reach high enough levels (which usually involves some in-app-purchasing).

Boinkers

Boinkers is a bonkers and off-color Coin Master-style “casino battler” — spin a slot machine, steal currency from other players, and press your luck on mini-games. Keep going until you run out of spins. Ultimately the game, basic as it is, has an addictive core loop. Players can accumulate in-game currency and qualify for the $BOINK coin airdrop.

Gatto

A new auto-battle and pet-raising game called Gatto actually has more mid-core strategy to it. The game seems to be on a steep upward curve, in terms of both revenue and engagement. Starting off as a simple game of collection and upgrading, the core loop quickly becomes a true PvP auto-battler which an pet army whose dominance depends on biome, species, and rarity. Eventually you can join leagues, trade the rarest cards as NFTs on marketplaces, and earn crypto rewards.

And Many More…

There are so many more seemingly profitable hits — Rocky Rabbit (a PvP battle sim), Fanton Fantasy Football (a soccer/football idle sim), Farm Frens (an idle farming game), MemeFi Club with its clans and raids, the 18+ “dating” and clicker game Pocket Waifu, not to mention thousands of others slowly rising through the charts.

You can browse a full list on ton.app:

Why So Popular and How Can I Get In On This?

There are two big reasons the top games of this genre are working right now:

a) Easy to jump in. Once you’re in Telegram, it won’t be unusual for a friend to invite you to one of their games — they often will get some rewards if you take the bait. You may also come across a game via a sponsored/influenced post on X or Discord. In one tap, you can join a dedicated Telegram channel… a bot will ask you to begin playing. Tap the button and you’re off to the races! No download or install or pesky permissions necessary.

b) Untold riches (well, at least, ‘beer money’). Almost all of the fast-growing titles have an associated token airdrop. The games come with promises — sometimes vague — of giving a big chunk of launched tokens to top players. Telegram is perfect for crypto because of its privacy — it’s difficult to regulate games where the messaging is encrypted. Telegram also built its own blockchain, The Open Network (TON) — and has an associated $TON coin. Transactions are incredibly fast and almost negligible in cost. Games can pay out in $TON and it goes right into player’s wallets.

In other words, most of these games are the resurgence of web3 / crypto gaming, but in a place where the user experience for onboarding, buying tokens, and cashing tokens out is clean and seamless. In fact, a recent report by Game7 indicates that 21% of web3 games launched in 2024 chose Telegram as their platform.

Ultimately, most of today’s hit Telegram games are ‘spreadsheet games’: free-to-play gamified activities gated by time or energy, where players must often spend a bit to make any real progress. Rather than an unrealistic inflationary economy as we saw with early Web3 titles, these Telegram games generally only pay out a percentage of revenue once it is actually earned by the publisher. In this way, the promise of “play-to-airdrop” games is that players can get a payday for helping to grow the game.

How They Monetize?

Hard Currency: Stars

Telegram released a hard currency called Stars in July. These can be purchased via normal in-app-purchase techniques on Apple or Google. Any game can charge these Stars for normal in-app-purchases such as boosts, in-game currency, or cosmetics.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: Games can offer recurring subscriptions to their users using Stars.

GIFTING: One very innovative use of Stars is the ability for apps to allow their players to send Paid Gifts to each other — special badges or achievements that live outside of the game and that players can show off on their Telegram profile.

Telegram takes a 30% commission on all Star purchases, but this is mainly passed to Apple and Google for their cut of the action.

CASHING OUT: The actual Stars balance a game publisher earns can be reinvested in ads promoting the app, which in theory cuts out a lot of the “middle man” costs necessary for a publisher to pay in standard mobile gaming. Using stars gives publishers a 30% discount on ad buys.

Stars can also be used to increase the limit of bot messages sent to players. Each app can send 30 free messages per second — but by paying Stars, larger scale games can send up to 1,000 messages per second.

Ultimately, game publishers can cash out their Stars balance for $TON directly, if they (likely) prefer a more liquid currency that can be traded for Bitcoin, Dollars, Euros, or whatever!

TON: Seamless Buying w/ Crypto

Telegram makes it easy to connect your account to a TON wallet and begin spending or earning $TON. The TON wallet is natively built-in and an incredibly easy way to pay for microtransactions. Many games sell their in-app-purchases for $TON directly, perhaps avoiding platform fees and making it easier for players to immediately spend back rewards that may have been won.

The game will usually express the price in the in-app store in local currency (USD, Euros, etc.), but the actual purchase will then be converted to $TON.

For game publishers, earning $TON is also a clean and predictable way to have a liquid currency which can reliably be cashed out for fiat. The only cost comes in typical exchange and gas fees — all quite minimal.

NOTE: Telegram’s internal TON wallet connection doesn’t work in the United States or United Kingdom (due to regulatory concerns). Other countries in Europe are keeping a close eye on Telegram — with a lot of outrage about how the privacy features may lead to criminal or exploitative behavior. As such, most successful Telegram games today focus on developing markets such as India, Nigeria, Brazil, and Latin America. That said, U.S. players can connect an external wallet pretty easily and play at their own risk.

Ads

There are a few companies emerging that make it easy to embed rewarded ads, most of which lead to other Telegram games. AdsGram is a major player, as is Fragment.

There are also “Offer Wall’ style companies offering task-based quests, such as BountyBay. Games can include these quests in their meta-game and earn commissions.

Challenges & Issues

So is this a viable, easy-peasy way to launch a successful game?

Viable, yes. Easy-peasy — not really.

Currently, most of the Telegram games are pretty low quality — simple clickers or casino titles and not much focus on trying to make the experience actually, well… beautiful or traditionally fun. Many of the games, in fact, seem ported from other casino or web platforms with an added reward / meta-game layer. This is typical for a new platform — we saw the same thing in the early days of Facebook gaming, where the first games focused on viral spread and simplistically addictive gameplay loops:

While it may seem “cheap and easy” to build games like this, it does require a specific and rare type of expertise:

Core Game, Meta-Game, and Crypto-Game Designs that Work

System design: The game requires a well-balanced and expandable core loop. Graphics may be relatively simplistic but every moment has to be ‘perfect.’ Experience with idle games — making a repetitive action seem fun and not taxing — is key. And meta-game systems such as leader-boards, events, and battle passes need to be interesting enough to scale for months and months — ideally with very little new content needed to be developed by the publisher.

Tokenomics / crypto design: Ultimately players need to believe that achieving some crypto rewards is realistic and achievable. This involves not just knowing how to launch a crypto token both technically, practically, and legally but being able to message the potential rewards in a way that is truthful and yet seems appealing to a large number of players.

Marketing & Discovery

Just dropping your game on Telegram probably won’t get it to magically spread. You’ll need a keen marketing plan. There are no established User Acquisition companies or go-to-market “playbooks” for Telegram yet. Developers must find their own distribution methods such as partnering with other communities or influencers. Direct partnerships with other games (usually via a quid-pro-quo traffic exchange) have proven to work wonders.

The main goal is to find the right influencers — ideally “play to earn” style celebrities who have heavy audiences on X, Twitch or YouTube — and whip up a frenzy of Discord chats, Telegram groups, and X posts where people are genuinely excited about the possibility of playing your game and getting something for it.

Once users are in your game, the k-factor tricks from Facebook gaming days come into play. Even the “lowest quality” games put a LOT of focus on social features — with affiliate clubs or other strong incentives to invite others and build community. Players that spread the game virally via X, Discord and Telegram itself are duly rewarded. Many games also have “affiliate” rewards whereby those who share video, gifts, and invites can earn a piece of the action for any money their recruits eventually spend.

Tech

In addition to these design and operational skills, we’ve found that the successful games require some key technical skills. The dev team needs to be experienced with HTML5 and web tech — the know-how to make a game load quickly and have decent quality — even if it’s just a “web game”. A team also needs robust back-end platform knowledge, since top games require that millions of players need to be supported.

Engineers need good knowledge of how to code the crypto layer and how to integrate with wallets and airdrop / reward coins securely in a way that can’t be easily hacked or botted. And finally, teams will need keen knowledge of the Telegram Game Platform and the Bot API — authentication, in-app payments, and push notifications.

The Future

As with memecoins — we’re seeing a lot of the big Telegram games gain a huge following by promising to essentially deliver free money — only to immediately plummet in popularity when the gravy train stops running or when the ‘big payday’ turns out to be mere pennies. The drop in token price for many game-coins ($CATI, $HMSTR, $WATcoin) reflects that the economics aren’t perfect yet (compared to the ballooning price of $TON itself).

Can Telegram games find a sustainable way to grow?

We believe that just as early Facebook games became much more sophisticated and fun, the same will happen to Telegram games. Basic “clicker” mechanics will likely evolve into many different types of async multiplayer games, RPGs, casual “Quest” puzzle games, strategy titles, and — given the natural social network in the ecosystem — party-game style experiences.

Many other companies are putting their chips on the Telegram square. Joon Mo Kwon, the CEO of Delabs, was there at the onset of Kakaotalk back in 2014 where messaging apps “grew to become game distribution platforms” — his parent company’s games grossed $100 million in revenue that year. Given that today’s global Telegram audience is 25x that of the regional Kakao Messenger, they believe an outsized opportunity will follow.

Larger Publishers will begin to roll out a full portfolio of game offerings for various audiences, sharing interoperable assets and leveraging universal meta-game systems to keep players in their ecosystem. For example Catizen is building out its own game center with 18 games and counting. Animoca’s GAMEE has its own arcade of many mini games, all promoting each other.

In due time, we believe most big games won’t rely on crypto airdrops alone to grow their user base — though it will likely always be a winning acquisition strategy to add to the mix. Telegram will begin to have a better “app store” for discovery of new releases, and the cross-promo and advertising ecosystem will expand and mature.

The nice thing about games built with web technologies like HTML5 is that they can easily be ported to places like Discord, WeChat, LINE, or the open web. As such, we’ll start seeing many of these games spread beyond Telegram as a platform.

All in all, while these are early days for Telegram gaming, things are moving quickly. Attaining new users costs pennies compared to mobile app stores, Steam, or other crowded markets. It’s a great time to begin exploring and building an audience in this unique and crazy new world of encrypted communication.