Seeing Habibollah Sayyari parading his breastplate covered with medals in Tehran, it is hard to imagine him worrying about a few Russian hamsters. And yet midweek, the deputy coordinator of the army of the Islamic Republic of Iran warned his people in a statement to the country’s official news agency: Hamster Kombat, the game that Iranians have recently infatuated, is for him a dangerous “instrument of soft power in the hands of the West”. It would distract the people from the major subject of the moment, the presidential elections.
Shortly before him, Uzbek officials had sounded the alarm, alerting their own fellow citizens to the risk of scams. While in Ukraine, at the same time, there was concern about the use that will be made of the data collected by the Russians. Russians who wonder for their part if all this is not hiding a dangerous pyramid scheme. In short, Hamster Kombat is getting people talking and it deserves a little decryption. Sylvain Aig, author of an excellent popularization video on his Objectif Lune Crypto YouTube channel, helps us see things more clearly.
A rather banal game…
Hamster Kombat is not really a “triple A”, one of those big budget games that monopolize the attention of gamers and the media. Here, the player is asked to play as a hamster who runs a crypto bank and must complete a certain number of daily quests to make his store prosper. The game mechanics are quite boring: the main action consists of frantically tapping on the screen of your smartphone to collect coins which you must then invest wisely to build a financial empire.
What sets Hamster Kombat apart from the rest of smartphone games is its natural habitat: Telegram. The Russian encrypted messaging service has recently been enjoying renewed interest in its TON blockchain (this is off-topic and a bit long to explain, but the French at TheBigWhale did it very well) and has become a welcoming land for games revolving around cryptos.
“This type of game allows Telegram to recruit new users,” explains Sylvain Aig. People will discover Hamster Kombat, install Telegram and use TON and toncoin, the crypto that allows you to do lots of things. Because Telegram is no longer just messaging, it’s more than 800 applications. For regulatory reasons, they will never say that they are behind the game, but we know perfectly well that they are not far away. »
…with astonishing success
And Hamster Kombat has been able to make the most of this ecosystem. Born on this platform with a billion users, it relied on a simple mechanism to spread: sponsorship. “At certain times, if you want to progress in the game,” explains Sylvain Aig, “it is essential to have godchildren. »
Created on March 25, Hamster Kombat now claims 200 million users. A figure that is impossible to confirm but which is not crazy when compared to the game’s 10 million followers on X. “We play it a lot, even in France. Some people try it without much conviction, just in case it pays off. Others called their mom to say “sign up” because they needed to find referrals, adds the crypto expert. So obviously it’s an oil stain. »
Another key to success is its game mechanics: to succeed, the player must come back and type on their screen very frequently, otherwise they fall into ranking limbo. In Russia, where the game was created, Hamster Kombat addicts are so numerous that they have given rise to numerous memes or articles.
But banking on virality and addiction is nothing revolutionary. It’s even the basis for a smartphone game. If Hamster Kombat is so successful, it is because it combined these two ingredients with a third: the lure of profit.
An empty promise?
The magic word of recent months in the world of cryptocurrencies is based on 7 letters and thousands of YouTube channels, Telegram feeds or dedicated Discord servers: AIRDROP. Under this anglicism which evokes money falling from the sky, we designate the monetary reward offered to the first users of a service. It falls without warning for thousands of crypto users who just have to request it on a dedicated site. They are thus rewarded for having believed in a service before others and for having allowed it to develop.
Notcoin, another game on Telegram, gave rise to one of these “airdrops” in June. Of the 35 million users claimed, 11.5 million players received an endowment. The airdrop can be very generous (we are talking about four or five figures) or can be as little as a few dollars. Can fall at the beginning of an adventure or months later. Be distributed proportionally according to clear rules or without apparent logic. In short, the promise of an airdrop makes players salivate, but it generally only engages those who listen to it.
And Hamster Kombat got the mechanics right. “We don’t really know the conditions of the upcoming airdrop,” warns Sylvain Aig. For the moment there is nothing concrete. But there will inevitably be some disappointed people. » Because if 200 million users have to share the pie, some shares will be very small. And a majority of those who tap the hamster will leave disappointed.
A Western reflection
The equation is not the same, however, depending on where you live. In the West, we are increasingly chasing airdrops from decentralized finance platforms, which are more lucrative but require an initial investment. In countries with faltering economies, on the other hand, crypto games like Hamster Kombat reach a wide audience.
In 2022, Axie Infinity fever, one of the first games of its kind, hit the Philippines in the middle of the covid pandemic, with many players leaving their poorly paid and often exhausting jobs to play this gaming game from home. fight. After a few lucrative months, the source had gradually dried up, with more and more players competing for the jackpot. Some Filipinos then found themselves prisoners of an Axie that was less and less profitable and required more and more hours of practice.
In Iran, a country with galloping inflation, the hope of one day receiving a crypto airdrop is obviously a delightful prospect. However small the reward may ultimately be. But as Iranians are called to the polls on June 28 to elect their president, this new trend is not going down well. “A society that, instead of working, turns to such games is gradually losing the culture of effort and the spirit of enterprise,” could be read recently in the state press, reports AP. In the land of the Mullahs, many like Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi, would like to stop gambling. But with a population largely equipped with smartphones and a currency that continues to lose value, they will undoubtedly have a hard time putting the golden hamster back in its cage.
