From glory to oblivion: are Tap-to-Earn games dead, or do they still have a chance?

After the phenomenal success of Notcoin in early 2024, which brought millions of users profit, the market was flooded with similar clones with primitive gameplay. However, user frustration, rising project launch costs, and falling profitability call into question the future of this format. Will «tap» games be able to evolve to survive, or are they doomed to disappear forever?

TMA or Telegram Mini App — web applications that are opened inside the Telegram messenger. They are created using standard web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. TMA allows users to interact with various services and access additional features without leaving Telegram.

After the debut of Telegram Mini Apps in 2023, Telegram allowed developers to start integrating the TON blockchain into their apps in January 2024, which marked the beginning of their rapid adoption.

Telegram’s mini-apps have reached a reach of over 950 million. One of the most popular among them is the type of games under the general name «tap games» or «taps». This name comes from the English «to tap».

We owe the emergence of such numerous TMA games to launch of Notcoin (NOT) in early 2024. In this primitive game, you had to click on the image of a coin to earn Notcoins, which were then converted into real crypto tokens of the same name. Although the owners of premium Telegram accounts and those who recruited many people through referral links managed to make the most. Even ordinary players managed to make a good profit by selling their tokens on exchanges or placing them in various pools. And this is without any investment. In just 3 months, 35 million people played Notcoin.

The success of the first «tap game» led to the emergence of a trend and numerous similar applications with primitive and copycat gameplay that quickly became boring for real users. Airdrops started to become smaller and smaller, if not pathetic.

So, can we say that tapas are dying? Let’s find out.

Loss of user trust and interest from developers

Full games in TON ecosystem are rare. Many projects had to adapt to new trends in order to monetize. This led to massive user frustration: people spent valuable time but did not receive the expected reward.

Let’s take an example Hamster Kombat (already called the most failed project of the year). For half a year, players faithfully poked at the screens, waiting for a generous scattering of coins. But the ending was sad, especially for ordinary players. To get a solid reward in the game, the most important indicators were the number of friends invited, keys used, and then — passive income. That is, the process of tapping itself was almost useless. It was unrealistic to get a significant airdrop without investing a penny in upgrading your hamster. Most players earned $10-$50.

At the same time, commercial (professional) crypto investors always expect that their investments in donations (at least premium subscriptions, purchased Telegram bots, and transaction fees) should pay off several times over.

At conferences and various meetings, TMA developers, for their part, complain about the growth in the cost of traffic, with lower solvency of the audience and fall of general interest. In addition, it has become difficult to attract users to quality projects because of the negative stereotypes that have already been formed.

In addition, while players used to be able to list Notcoin (NOT) on major crypto exchanges for free, now they increasingly have to pay all the costs. For developers, even a listing can be very expensive: the costs reach a total of about $2 million.

For example, the Hamster Kombat team decided that in order to receive HMSTR game tokens, users should deposit their accounts on the TON blockchain to pay for transactions worth about 1 TON ($5-$7). Thus, the financial costs of distributing tokens were shifted to the players themselves. Considering that some users managed to earn only $10-$20, they were not happy about the airdrop. And the audience unfamiliar with the operation of crypto wallets and their replenishment had to work harder.

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

So what do tapas makers make money on?

Typically, tap games are made according to the following simple scheme: a user enters the application, spends his or her time on the app, invests some money, and then receives his or her reward (or ban) on the eve of the listing. The project shares the revenue with users to increase activity and successfully launch the token. But where does this revenue come from?

The answer is very simple: from advertising sales. Each tap game has a section with tasks where you need to play another game, subscribe to a social network, or watch a YouTube video. Such actions are rewarded much better than simple tapping. And for these tasks, the game organizers receive very real advertising money. Because by completing tasks, players visit different pages, increasing the views of websites and YouTube channels. And the cost of one view by a user is, of course, much higher than the value of the tokens they will receive for their time.

The trend is falling into the abyss

The lack of real use and application of the earned tokens, other than selling them on the exchange, is one of the biggest problems. This leads to a rapid depreciation and sale of coins. Due to the distribution of large amounts of tokens among millions of users, each of them receives a penny, so they become frustrated and lose interest in tokens in general. In addition, most projects are Web2-based, and Web3 components (the same blockchain technology) are added only formally, without any real practical application.

There has also been a recent negative trend of using low-quality, artificial traffic as the basis for successful TMA projects. The so-called motivated trafficA method of promotion in which users are paid for their actions., multi-accounts, and other means are used to boost the reach. But the real price of such users is a couple of cents. However, this is a low-quality, inactive and insolvent audience.

Loss of interest can be seen in the data DefiLlama: Total blocked value (TVL)The total value of assets placed in a particular protocol. in various TON projects has grown rapidly since the beginning of the year, coinciding with the launch of NOT and the subsequent influx of games, jumping to $776 million in the summer. But now this figure has almost halved to $379 million. And as you know, TVL often serves as an indicator of user engagement, liquidity, and the overall health of the ecosystem.

Therefore, taps in their traditional form is likely to disappear.

In order to attract a truly valuable (and solvent) audience, a new and interesting format needs to be created, and a real economy around game tokens so that they can be used beyond simply selling on exchanges or placing them in poolsA liquidity pool is a fund that holds assets used to provide liquidity on decentralized platforms. Participants contribute their assets to the pool in exchange for tokens representing their share of the pool. This mechanism allows users to trade assets without having to find counterparties, as liquidity is provided by the participants themselves. Holders of the pool tokens can receive commissions for transactions conducted on the platform depending on their share in the pool..