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You are a hamster, you want to get rich, and you’re also the CEO of a crypto exchange. This is the premise of Hamster Kombat, the new Telegram “mini-game” that claims to have more than 300 million players. It’s become so popular that in June, an Iranian military leader accused it of distracting voters amidst the country’s elections, saying it was a tool in the West’s “soft war” against Iran’s theocracy.
The game’s creators are anonymous, so there’s no telling whether they’re involved in election tampering. Over email—they were too spooked about doxing to get on the phone—the people claiming to be Hamster Kombat’s developers swore they did not work for the US government, joking, “Should we send a confirmation letter from our CIA email?”
The founders are cagey about their backgrounds, but here’s what they told WIRED: They’ve worked in professional gaming for 15 years, they’ve been mining and trading bitcoin since it was below $100, they have no outside investors, their team is now 50 people (working remotely with no headquarters), and they had the idea for Hamster Kombat in January. Why hamsters? “We just love hamsters! And some of our team members used to have them as pets in childhood.”
The game launched on March 26, and immediately users began playing to earn free “coins” that will (they hope) soon have value. Now there are supposedly more Hamster CEOs than there are people in France, Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom combined.
While user numbers can’t be verified, the Hamster Kombat Telegram channel has 53 million subscribers (the largest in the app), their YouTube channel has nearly 35 million (more than Beyoncé’s 27 million), their X account has 12 million. Even accounting for bot-puffery, the game is arguably the fastest-growing project in the history of crypto.
“There were two specific precursors to our idea,” explain the creators. The first was Telegram’s “mini-app” ecosystem, which they view as the next mega-platform. “Telegram is basically the only social platform that natively supports Web3 and has 950 million users,” claim the founders. And this ecosystem has a smooth UX; in one click you begin playing. The creators liked that they could “immediately convert incoming users without requiring them to download an app from the App Store or Google Play.”
The second inspiration was the overnight success of a crypto game called Notcoin, launched on Telegram in early January, where you simply tap-tap-tap the screen to earn coins. At first the coins were worth nothing. (Notcoin: Not really a coin.) Then users’ Web3 wallets (native to Telegram, thanks to The Open Network, aka TON) were magically airdropped cryptocurrency. As Telegram CEO Pavel Durov wrote in his channel, “All of a sudden, Notcoin users who just played this game for fun could convert their in-game currency into real money.”
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Other Telegram games (such as Yescoin and Catizen) followed a similar playbook—“hyper-casual” mini-games that shower users with coins, which players gobble up in the hopes of a future airdrop. (The more free coins you have now, the more real money you have later.) But none of those games bothered Iran’s military. So what sets the hamsters apart?
The founders reveal their third inspiration, and this one’s less obvious: TikTok.
“First, there was Musical.ly, and it almost died,” say the founders, referring to the original incarnation of TikTok. Then ByteDance (which acquired Musical.ly) found ways to incentivize sharing. “People underestimate the effect of these tiny mechanisms,” say the creators. “Sometimes, they can turn the tide.”
Tiny mechanisms are everywhere in Hamster Kombat. You earn coins for inviting friends to the game, watching YouTube videos, subscribing to the Telegram channel, and so on. “We knew that the only way for us to grow was by making everything inside the game viral,” claim the founders. “We simply didn’t have $50 million for marketing.”
Going viral doesn’t happen by accident. Every day, the founders obsessively follow real-world events and incorporate them into the gameplay. “When Dubai hosted a crypto conference and suddenly got flooded, it was a devastating situation, but you could feel the irony,” say the creators. “We went and made a card [in the game] about this. And then people just started getting this card, taking screenshots, posting on social [media].”
The game is deeply self-aware and packed with crypto Easter eggs. “I can open Hamster Kombat and see this inside joke that reflects what the community is saying,” says Amanda Cassatt, the CEO of Serotonin, a marketing firm. “The game is fun, and it’s funny.”
When you first open Hamster Kombat, it looks so simple it doesn’t even feel like a game. Tap, get coins. Tap, get coins. “I wouldn’t consider it a game. It’s sort of entertainment,” says Matvii Diadkov, the founder of the crypto advertising network Bitmedia who has created and analyzed crypto games. “It’s even more primitive than hyper-casual games.”
But then something weird happens. When you explore the app, you’re confronted with a dizzying menu of options for scaling your hamster’s crypto exchange, such as investing in your UX and UI team, building an NFT metaverse (remember those?), or obtaining a legal license to operate in Nigeria. These options are deep cuts into Web3 nerd-dom, often requiring a bit of research if you’re an outsider. Each option has a cost (in the free coins you earn), but investing in it can boost your hamster’s profit-per-hour. This can get addicting.
“I realized that strategy helps save time and improve efficiency,” says Liliya Chumarina, a 24-year-old freelance marketer who lives in Milan. At first she just clicked, then she watched the game’s educational videos (racking up social media views for Hamster Kombat), then she created a spreadsheet to help her optimize yield. Thanks to this automation, Chumarina says, “now I usually spend no more than one hour per day.” (Cassatt considers the game not as simple as tic-tac-toe, but not as complicated as chess. “It’s checkers.”)
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The founders seem exasperated by the game’s “hyper-casual” label. “Some people call it a tap-to-play game. It’s not exactly right and dumbs it down,” say the creators. “You only need to tap at the very beginning. Very soon, you get access to all the passive income streams which quickly outweigh everything else.”
When asked to explain the game’s cartoonishly simple mechanics, they reply, “Have you ever tried Tinder?” They clarified that “modern apps have spent millions of dollars learning how to put people on board.” The simplicity is a feature not a bug. (Things are less simple in the US, where Telegram does not support a native crypto wallet, thanks to regulatory concerns and earlier settlements with the SEC. Technically TON and Telegram are separate entities.)
The big looming question, apart from the creators’ identities, is whether the game can be sustainable. (Crypto projects get that question a lot.) “You cannot get monetary value from tapping the screen. It’s obvious,” says Diadkov. Then again, the question of whether digital cryptocurrency can have “real value” has existed since the inception of bitcoin, and you can argue that if a community decides that something has value, it has value.
That perceived value, of course, can be fickle. Axie Infinity, the “play-to-earn” gaming darling from the last crypto bull market, ultimately flopped. I ask the founders point-blank how Hamster Kombat is different from Axie. (One difference is obvious: Axie users had to buy NFTs to play the game, and those could cost over $100.)
“First, we are already profitable. We have multiple revenue channels,” the founders claim. “We sell ads in our game. We get money from our YouTube ads (we have 18 channels in different languages). We have the largest Telegram channel, and Telegram shares the advertising revenue with channel owners.”
You’d also be hard-pressed to find many online communities that claim 300 million members. This alone has value. Even if the Hamster Kombat game itself is economically unsustainable, that community can be monetized. And now they’re onboarded into the TON ecosystem.
“This is a fairly genius stroke from the Telegram team,” says David Nage, a portfolio manager at Arca, a Web3 VC firm. He views Hamster Kombat (and the other games like Notcoin) as an entrance to a shopping mall, and now everyone will watch to see what people do once they’re there. “What do they do next?” Nage says. “Do they go to the mini-app store? Do they use social-fi applications? Are there DeFi applications?”
Hamster Kombat, in a sense, is a Trojan horse to get people into crypto. Telegram CEO Durov has said it has the potential to introduce “the benefits of blockchain to hundreds of millions of people.” The creators say this is their endgame. It was designed as a tongue-in-cheek meta-classroom for crypto concepts. “We want to onboard the next billion people to Web3, so we had to show everyone how Web3 actually works,” say the founders. “And the simplest way to do so is through the game.”
What’s next for Hamster Kombat? In a just-released white paper, the creators claim its upcoming airdrop will be “the largest airdrop in the history of crypto.” That will reward hundreds of millions of users with a “HMSTR” token that has an uncertain value. They can then sell it or use it in a new Hamster Economy. “We want to build an ecosystem around Hamster Kombat centered around game publishing,” say the creators. “That’s what we know how to do best. The future token will be at the center of this ecosystem of interconnected games and services.”
Maybe the token will go to the moon, and some of these Hamster CEOs will become actual millionaires. Maybe the token will crash, leaving millions of players jaded. Both options are in play. That, too, is how Web3 actually works.
Correction: 8/1/2024, 1:40 pm EDT: Wired corrected the name of The Open Network.
