- Hamster Kombat loses 259M users, dropping its active base to just 41M in months.
- The game’s token value plummeted 76%, further straining its already dwindling user base.
- Government concerns and user frustration over token issues add to Hamster Kombat’s challenges.
Hamster Kombat, which was once popular in the blockchain gaming industry, is a tap-to-earn game on Telegram that has lost most of its users. This comes just a few months after the game was able to boast having 300 million players in the month of August and as it stands the game has lost around 259 million users giving it an active monthly player base of approximately 41 million.
Source: Image by Protos
Hamster Kombat Decline
To compound the difficulties, the game’s token value has decreased dramatically, plummeting 73% from its initial price of $0.009993 on September 26 to its recent low of $0.002364. This sharp drop is quite opposite to the enthusiasm at the beginning of the year when Pavel Durov, the head of Telegram, called Hamster Kombat ‘the fastest growing digital service in the world’. He said he believed the game belonged to the new generation of mini-apps that are intended to popularize the use of blockchain.
Source: TradingView
Nigerian local media have suggested that many players felt cheated by the small worth of HMSTR tokens they got, hundreds of players were struggling to sell them at prices in the range of tens of cents per token after several weeks of playing the game.
Adding to the frustration, the game kept on postponed the airdrop and the users are not even sure when it would actually happen. When the tokens were distributed, a large number of players were excluded because of the new anti-cheat system; this excluded about 2.3 million players and seized about 6.8 billion HMSTR tokens.
Hamster Faces Regulatory Heat
This has not come without attracting attention from government officials particularly from countries such as Iran and Russia. The deputy chief of Iran’s armed forces said that the game could be a ‘soft tool’ to divert people’s attention during the election period and that it is against the concept of religious governance in the country. The Head of the State Duma Committee also complained and stated that the game should be prohibited and called it a scam that threatens Russian citizens.
During this period of crisis, Hamster Kombat has also been criticized for its links with Gotbit which was recently charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for ‘market manipulation as a service’. On October 12, the game’s developers disavowed Gotbit publicly and released a statement to the players that they would not engage in cheating.
Loss of interest, a split player audience, and increased regulation challenges make it difficult for Hamster Kombat to regain its popularity. The once promising game now faces severe problems in its bid to woo back a skeptical audience.
