From glory to oblivion: are “tapal games” completely dead or do TMA games still have a chance?

After the spectacular success of Notcoin in early 2024, which brought profit to millions of users, the market was flooded with clones similar to primitive gameplay. However, consumer disappointment, rising project launch costs and falling profitability cast doubt on the future of this format. Will the “sneakers” be able to evolve to survive, or are they about to disappear forever?

TMA app or Telegram Mini – web applications that open within the Telegram messenger. They are created using standard web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. TMA allows users to interact with different services and access additional features without leaving Telegram.

After the first Telegram Mini Apps in 2023, Telegram allowed developers to start incorporating the TON blockchain into their apps in January 2024, marking the beginning of rapid adoption.

Telegram mini apps reach over 950 million. One of the most popular among them is a type of game under the general name “tapalki”. This name comes from the English “to tap”, which means “to press”.

We owe it to so many TMA games to come up Notcoin (NOT) launch in early 2024. In this primitive game, you had to click on a coin icon to earn Notcoin, which was then converted into a real crypto token of the same name. Despite the fact that the main Telegram account holders and those who referred many people through referral links managed to earn the most, even ordinary players managed to make good money by sell their tokens on exchanges or put them in different types of pools. And this is without any investment. Within 3 months alone, 35 million people played Notcoin.

The success of the first “sneaker” led to a movement and several similar applications with primitive and copycat gameplay, which quickly began to attract serious users. Airdrops began to become less, if not pathetic.

So can we say that tapalki is dying? Let’s figure it out.

Lose user trust and developer interest

Games in full A TON of ecosystem is rare. Many projects had to adapt to new trends in order to make money. This led to consumer frustration, with people wasting valuable time but not getting the benefits they expected.

Let’s take the example of Hamster Kombat (which is already called the most disastrous project of the year). For half a year, players faithfully stared at the screens, expecting a generous scattering of coins. But the ending was sad, especially for regular players. To get a solid reward in the game, the most important indicators were the number of friends invited, the keys used, and then passive income. That is, the tapping process itself was almost useless. Because it was impractical to get a big airdrop without investing a penny in upgrading your hamster. Most players won $10-$50.

At the same time, commercial (professional) cryptans always expect that their investment in contributions (at least premium subscription, purchased Telegram bots, and transaction fees) should pay off​​​​ off several times.

At conferences and various types of meetings, TMA developers, for their part, complainincrease in traffic costs, a reduction in the vulnerability of the audience andcomply with the general interest. It has become difficult to attract users to quality projects because of existing negative stereotypes.

In addition, if players could withdraw Notcoin (NOT) to large crypto exchanges for free, now more and more often they have to pay all the costs. Because of developers, even registration can be very expensive: costs reach about $2 million in total.

For example, the Hamster Kombat team decided that users must independently fund their accounts in the TON blockchain in order to pay for transactions of around 1 TON ($5-$7) to get HMSTR game tokens get Therefore, the financial costs of distributing tokens were transferred to the players themselves. Since some users only managed to earn $10-$20, they were not very happy with the airdrop. And the audience, who were not familiar with the working of crypto wallets and their replenishment, had to work hard.

Therefore, many people who did not want to spend time replenishing their wallet, or the cost of their tokens was lower than the commission, simply closed the game and will not enter again. Now hundreds of millions of coins will remain in the system and can easily fall into the hands of developers. Win-win?

How does tapalki make money?

Usually, tapals are made according to this simple scheme: the user enters the application, spends his time on tasks in it, deposits a certain amount of money, and then ‘ get his reward (or suspension) the night before the listing. The project shares revenue with users to increase activity and successfully launch the token. But where does this income come from?

The answer is very simple: advertising sales. Each tapalka has a section with tasks where you have to play another game, subscribe to a social network, or watch a video on YouTube. Such actions are rewarded much better than simple poking. And for these actions, the organizers of the game receive real money for advertising. Because while performing tasks, players visit different pages, increasing views of sites and YouTube channels. And the cost of one user’s view is, of course, much greater than the cost of the signals he receives for the time spent.

The trend is going downhill

One of the biggest problems is the lack of use and use of the earnings tokens, as well as selling on the exchange. This leads to a rapid depreciation and sale of coins. As a result of distributing many tokens among millions of users, each of them receives a penny, so they become disappointed and lose interest in tapal games in general. In addition, most projects have a Web2 foundation, and Web3 components (the same blockchain technology) are added only formally, without real practical use.

Also, recently there has been a negative trend of using low quality artificial traffic as the basis for successful TMA projects. Called incentivized trafficA promotional method in which users are paid for their actions.multiple accounts and other methods used to increase coverage. But the real price for such users is a few cents. However, this is a low-quality, inactive and broken audience.

A loss of interest can be seen in the data Challenge: total locked up value (TVL)The total value of the funds allocated to a particular protocol. across several projects, TON has grown rapidly since the beginning of the year, coinciding with the release of NOT and the subsequent influx of games, jumping to $776 million this summer. But now this figure has almost decreased and comes to $ 379 million and, as you know, TVL is often an indicator of customer engagement, liquidity and the general state of the ecosystem .

So, most likely, slippers in their traditional form will disappear.

To attract a really valuable (and paying) audience, we need to create a new interesting format, and a real economy around game tokens so that they can be used beyond just selling on exchanges or staking in pools.A liquidity pool is an asset that holds assets that are used to provide liquidity on decentralized platforms. Participants add their assets to the pool, where they receive tokens representing their stake in the pool. This mechanism allows users to trade assets without the need to find counterparties, as liquidity is provided by the participants themselves. Holders of pool tokens can receive fees for transactions made on the platform according to their share in the pool..

Article with affiliate linksThis material contains links to partners – this does not affect the content and editorial policy, but it allows the publication to improve.