How does TON Games complete the business loop after viral marketing?
Paid game items and selling traffic have become the main means of monetization.Author: Nan Zhi, Odaily Planet Daily
With the explosive popularity of Notcoin, the TON ecosystem has emerged with a viral growth model through Telegram invitations. This approach has already seen multiple examples in WeChat mini-program games, such as "Sheep Has a Sheep," "Merge Big Watermelon," and "Cute Dog Transformation."
However, due to licensing restrictions, domestic games cannot adopt a direct payment model, and the most common monetization method is through advertising. In the Telegram ecosystem, there are no various restrictions, and the convenient link to the TON wallet provides an easy channel for payments. After viral marketing, how can these TON ecosystem games monetize users commercially?
Paid Items
Taking the most popular clicker games as an example, the in-game tokens or points in such games are directly related to the number of clicks. Some clicker games have introduced the use of TON for boosts, but the fees are generally low. In TapSwap, users can pay 0.5 TON (approximately $3.5) to permanently double their points. If users believe that the game's tokens have a high expected value, purchasing Boost becomes a must for long-term participants.
In addition to clicker games, there are also projects with genuine gameplay. The underlying logic for users purchasing in these games is not solely based on the expectation of token issuance in the crypto space; some users are willing to pay for the game itself.
Taking the well-known Catizen as an example, this game is similar to the popular "Cute Dog Transformation" that went viral on WeChat years ago. Users can nurture pets of various levels, collect the tokens they produce, and then continue to nurture higher-level pets. At that time, "Cute Dog Transformation" could only monetize through advertisements, while Catizen has developed a different gameplay in the TON ecosystem.
First, Catizen has introduced a paid item purchase module, allowing users to pay TON to obtain Fish tokens, which can accelerate the pet hatching process in Catizen, with rapidly increasing marginal costs. For top-ranking users, the payments are more for the game itself rather than for game rewards. According to Catizen's official disclosure, over 50% of users have become paying users, indicating a very high conversion rate. Beyond paid items, Catizen plans to become a game Launchpool platform, which we will analyze later.
Entrepreneurship Targeting Exchanges
Exchange Commission Registration
While other games are still incentivizing users through invitation tasks, TapSwap was the first to introduce a Binance new account registration task, verified with a referral code.
The number of Telegram users has surpassed 900 million, compared to Binance's 200 million users, indicating significant development space. However, it is worth noting that the top five download regions for Telegram are India, Russia, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil, most of which are non-crypto industries and Binance-friendly countries, raising doubts about the achievable user growth.
Exchange Product Traffic Diversion
Pixelverse is a nurturing battle game where users automatically earn game tokens over time and then train pets for battles.
In the Dashboard task list, Pixelverse has added tasks in collaboration with the Bybit Web3 wallet, reaching 700,000 participating addresses eight days after launch. Odaily has queried data from previous completed activities, noting that the last six activities lasted about 3-4 weeks, with participating addresses of 320,000, 250,000, 580,000, 120,000, 70,000, and 80,000 respectively. This indicates that the number of users that the TON ecosystem can capture is far higher than that of native Web3 projects, showing a clear advantage in traffic growth.
Traffic Monetization
From the previous section, we can see that traffic growth is a prominent advantage of Telegram, and projects that have built large communities can redirect their traffic to other projects, monetizing through this channel.
Returning to Catizen, the official has disclosed the next steps for the Launchpool and game platform development roadmap. Catizen has signed contracts with over ten WeChat mini-games, planning to gradually launch these games on the Catizen game platform. Transitioning from Gaming Bot to game Launchpool empowers governance token holders.
Many projects adopt this method, with varying practical paths. For example, the educational application XPLUS directly drives traffic to Catizen through homepage advertising, while the clicker game PocketFi allows users to consume tokens from another application, TON PUNKS, to gain click boosts.
Conclusion
By breaking down the closed-loop logic of TON ecosystem projects into three stages: user visits, payment conversion, and user retention and repurchase, it is evident that relying on Telegram gives TON ecosystem projects a natural and significant advantage in acquiring sufficient user visits.
However, in terms of user conversion, aside from a few genuinely engaging projects, most do not have sufficient reasons to attract users to pay, aside from token issuance expectations, and there is severe homogenization, making it even more difficult for non-top projects to convert paying users.
Therefore, the "success guru" or "shovel seller" has become the only method for closing their business model loop, which is to occupy a leading position and then sell traffic to other projects for profit.
Currently, the TON ecosystem projects have initially demonstrated the feasibility of a free game viral growth + paid value-added model, but how to truly leverage Telegram's unlimited dissemination capabilities, the highly compatible crypto wallet expansion, and the vast base of 900 million users remains to be seen in the next answer.
