TON Games: Not Just Another Clicker Token

Although they’re nothing like ambitious extraction shooter Shrapnel or the deep social mechanics of Pixels and Alien Worlds, TON’s ecosystem games shouldn't be brushed off as insignificant.

Despite the recent surge in web3 gaming tokens, the overall number of players has remained relatively low compared to the traditional gaming market. However, a recent development in the Telegram ecosystem could be setting the stage for mass web3 adoption.

With the integration of social mini-games on the TON blockchain, developers can now build games, wallets, exchanges, and other dapps on top of Telegram. This marks a significant departure from previous social gaming experiences, such as Zynga's Farmville on Facebook, which lacked access to payment systems, NFT storage solutions, smart contracts, and other web3 capabilities.

A recent report by web3 investment firm Delphi Digital delves into the TON gaming ecosystem, highlighting some of the most notable games. While these games may not yet rival the complexity of an extraction shooter like Shrapnel or the deep social mechanics of Pixels and Alien Worlds, they should not be dismissed as insignificant.

Available to Telegram's 900 million users, these games offer a potential solution to the onboarding friction that has plagued web3. As the report notes, "If nothing else, these games showcase how to onboard users to web3 en masse." Moreover, the genres of games being built on TON are sure to expand beyond the simple clicker games that have dominated the ecosystem thus far.

Indeed, as previously reported by BSC News, the TON platform has seen a rapid growth in the number of games available, recently expanding from 120 to 160 games. Now, the latest figures put the total number of games at 176.

As the momentum has steadily grown throughout 2024, tap game Notcoin, which launched on 1st January, was one of the first to kick it off.

In mid-June, it claimed to have hit 40 million users. Its NOT token launched on Binance at $1 billion FDV in June, peaked at $2.1 billion, and has since gone down to around $1.45 billion, according to the report. More recently, the price of NOT has increased again following an announcement it’s joined forces with AI/web3 gaming analytics company Helika to help game developers building on Telegram.

Jointly leading the charge with Notcoin is Hamster Kombat. Unlike NOT, its token is yet to be launched, and that’s accelerating its traction. The latest claimed number of players is 250 million.

Another game growing in esteem more recently is Catizen. Previously building games on WeChat, its developer has seen its cat breeding swipe game attract over 20 million registered users within two months of launching. Notably, according to the report “Catizen is the top game by in-game revenue through IAPs on TON. Over $10 million in TON has been sunk into the game by their 2.7 million DAU. Additionally, around 50% of the 1.25 million on-chain users are paying customers.”

It’s worth noting that to a large extent, Catizen’s growth is down to its future token airdrop, with the promise of 42% being allocated to players at the token launch.

Putting its user numbers in context, it’s worth comparing to the onchain data we regularly gather from analytics platforms such as DappRadar. It’s not clear why the numbers don’t align, but while Catizen itself claims millions of daily users, its DAUW total is only tracked at around 100,000 daily wallets. This highlights some of the data reporting issues arising from the highly viral and very-easy-to-bot Telegram/TON-based games.

Moreover, we recently looked at the level of bots in games such as Pixels, Splinterlands, and Alien Worlds, which showed that bot activity can quickly surge despite active measures against it. Games on TON are not immune to this. Indeed, quite the opposite, some might say they provide an ideal environment for bots to thrive.

Another crucial question is how well these games can retain their users. As the report points out, “Although those numbers are impressive, teams building on TON will need to prove their ability to run successful liveops and convert free-to-play users into paying customers without infinite inflationary token reward strategies.”

To this end, more niched games like Fanton, a fantasy soccer game which doesn’t promise big token payouts, could be a more sustainable bet. Although nothing the size of Notcoin or Hamster Kombat, yet, Fanton shows there’s potential for other games beyond easy clickers on TON. Claiming 200,000 monthly active users, the free-to-play tournaments run over the last couple of weeks only reached 1000-5000 players however.

Among all the clicker tokens is TON’s own TON token. Where many gaming and meme-coins have zero utility, TON is the underlying gas

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