Telegram: The Next Great Gaming Platform?

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most sophisticated fraud attempts with decisions made in under half a second and up to 98% approval rates insure AI ensures more legitimate transactions get approved delivering a seamless experience for players plus with a chargeback guarantee you can focus on growing your business while the risk is handled for you key players in the game and turn payment fraud into a profit center with insure AI to learn more simply head to ins. a/ gaming or check out the link in the show notes now let's jump into the episode hello and welcome to the navit gaming podcast I'm your host Nick oori today we have a very special episode for you we are going somewhere where many of our listeners probably haven't ventured yet but it is absolutely a place that you should know about we are talking about one of the fastest growing distribution channels for games out there and that is telegram you've probably heard about the controversy around Telegram and the in

France recently of its founder pav durov for not sharing information with the police about criminal activity on Telegram and it is absolutely true that telegram is an unpoliced unmoderated hot bed of all kinds of illicit activity where drugs are sold openly pornography shared and crimes are planned in play signed but one of the unique features of telegram uh which is the ability to create absolutely massive broadcast groups and its very open Nature that is unpoliced is also a potential opportunity for game developers for Mass distribution cheaply and easily and since just about all mass distribution channels for games are totally tapped out these days and wildly expensive this is not an opportunity to be overlooked so to learn more about telegram games and the opportunity for game developers I've invited someone who themselves has a hit game on telegram I think two million users in a matter of five weeks that's what's possible there so he's going to tell us about the experience of building there and what the opportunity might look like going forward it's fast

evolving this is fairly new stuff so without further Ado today I'm excited to welcome Simon Davis he is the founder and CEO of Mighty bear games to the show Simon welcome to the Pod thank you for having me Nico um it's uh you fulfilling a a yearl long ambition of finally making onto navic so there you go hopefully uh we're gonna have a good chat today we are definitely going to have a good chat we have a lot in common um and uh I think we have a similar world view on on some of these things we were just chatting about stuff uh for the for the PO about what this opportunity looks like and what the historical pattern recognition might be compared to um so okay with that out of the way let's get into today's episode so Simon I always like to start with the background of our guests especially ones who are doing interesting things and have been through the trenches which I know you have been uh with both Mighty bear games and and throughout your career so tell us more about who you are and your journey through the games industry yeah so uh I've been making games professionally for 20 years now so

so um I think like most gaming CEOs my background is something in something totally different so I have a four-year music degree degree uh I'm very proud that I have a first class honors degree in professional musicianship which has served me well in my current role um I did that for a few years uh before I realized that my time as a working musician had run its course so I decided I'd go all in on games and so um I'm fortunate enough that I come from a multilingual family and so I used to to work for a company called Babel media which today has keywords um I applied for a job there doing localization I actually ended up doing QA and so the very first game I worked on was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of the asab ban on PS2 2004 um and over the years you know I moved from that into doing design being a producer product lead uh I made my foray into online gaming in 200920 working at bigo which was a big

German browser gaming company ironically I think that experience probably has the most in common with telegram today so I was a product leader for game called Dark orbit which had its peak was you know doing uh upwards of 50 million EUR a year in top loan Revenue with uh a team of 20 guys working on a flash game on a flash MMO um from then I went on to work at Ubisoft so I was uh one of the product and design people in charge of Ghost Recon Online which was ub's ub's kind of big foray into games as a service and so a lot of the lessons that fed into Rainbow 6 and Scarlet bones came from that uh and then I was lucky enough to join King and so I was part of the team at the King Singapore studio uh that was called nonstop games uh unfortunately One Day in 2016 non-stop stopped and so at that point I decided I would depart with uh some of the best and brightest there you know we had the opportunity to continue with in King and moved to Europe but I had a thesis around the emergence of th southeast Asia as a Mobile gaming Powerhouse and

Market uh in 2016 and actually we're starting to see it now it's only taken eight years through Telegram and a couple in web 3 as well and so it's been a a very interesting few years as a Founder both the very first game we built as a studio was an MMO RPG so I was drawing on my browser gaming experience um I had hair when we did that so I don't really recommend building an MMO with nine people um but it did Lay the foundations for everything we do today on the infrastructure side and back end uh then we did a couple we did another freeto play game we did a couple of games with apple on Apple arcade we were one of the first and best performing games and apple arade with Battle Royale which is a food themed Battle Royale we hit people with baguettes and there's a tsunami of butter we did a game with Disney and then 2021 we were like okay we're going all in on web 3 because as you mentioned in your intro uh distribution is completely saturated we had a merge game which had like incredible day one metrics and within a very short period of time cpis went up

by 7x post idfa and I was like if I keep playing this game we're going to basically end up closing the studio in 18 months and so I pivoted to weave three and you know the studios that persisted with that game a lot of them have closed in recent years so that felt like the very move um first web 3 game we released as mighty action heroes came out late 2022 uh beginning of 23 and you know that game won best uh fre sorry best mobile web 3 Game of the Year last year the the game three fre Awards which is really cool but again like we're on that game we realize that distribution is a challenge and distribution is Destiny if distribution is Destiny you have to go where you have the biggest leverage right and you can impact the largest number of users and early this year we realized that there was two things firstly um skill gaming with a financialized element so we have a mode in might action heroes where you go head-to-head and you pay an entry fee there's a roulette wheel the roulette wheel determines the size of the payout

and then players compete to win that payout and that mode like completely outperformed everything else would ever done because the variable rewards and the chance to win a price and also telegram was the place where you had the most leverage in terms of re reaching users and so goat gaming which is what we've relaunched today or more recently is a platform which incorporates many of these games with these elements and then is being distributed via Telegram and you know we've achieved the scale in five weeks and none of our previous products have ever done yeah it's been uh it's been been somewhat of a roller coaster we're learning a lot like so early within telegram but it's very exciting yeah I mean listeners I wasn't kidding when I said Simon's been through the trenches um he really has as you heard there um and you know as game developers who've been through the trenches know it's those experiences and those failures along the way and the challenges that actually open your eyes to the opportunity that then is in front of you that others may not see that's why I'm saying I think many listeners of this podcast despite being game industry profession professionals may not I mean

I've obviously heard of telegram but may not know that it's actually pretty exciting and rocket ship growth uh platform for games right now now these games look very different to what uh you know your traditional air quotes game game industry insiders might say so Simon tell us a little bit more about what are these games what is there's going to be a lot of questions here so let's start with just what are these games on telegram how are they getting distributed what types of gameplay are you seeing there and what is unique about the telegram platform as a distribution Channel and also as a form factor for playing these games yeah I mean that's a lot of questions I know I know I'm I'm I'm dying to dig into all of these things though so I just start with distribution and light form factor so distribution method is very simple you know telegram is like any other messaging service you think of it like WhatsApp and imagine that within WhatsApp you would launch a basically a self-contained browser window and there'd be a game running in HTML 5 or webg so if you can build it in browser

uh chances are you can build it in Telegram and so from a form factor perspective that actually gives you a lot of scope the early games that have done very well have been you know if you have a curve not curve if you have like a scale of complexity they've been at the very far end of accessible you know there's nothing really that looks like a Forex game or hero RPG that's performing on telegram today uh so the very first games that did well were basically idle games where you could tap uh just like banana on Steam right and the financialized element of these was that they promised a future air drop so they were going to really certain cryptocurrency but you know depending on your score you would get more or less of that currency dropped to you when the game launched and so um you know not coin and hamster combat probably the two biggest ones hamster combat is involves Zero fighting uh you have a hamster Avatar which ostensibly is the CEO of a cryptocurrency uh trading platform so you could choose to be the CEO of binance in Hamster form

and then you're just tapping and collecting your profits but you know in web to like you go all the way back to Cookie Clicker right what was that 2010 like these games have formed they're proven like they've taken proven mechanics of clickers and they've adapted them and uh the top performing telegram games uh allegedly you know have over 100 million users so it's there's clearly a market for this stuff like telegram is a billion consumers and 200 million game today and so it makes perfect sense that the first wave are going to be the most accessible games but I mean as you and I discussing prior to the our chat rate um the games that eventually emerge will look very different to what we playing on mobile today or on social networks and so I'm already starting to see like hybrid casual games emerging I saw a game today that Rifts on Monopoly go uh I've seen some games that look like coin Master with a Twist

uh and so you're already starting to see that shift towards like I guess the Casual end of midcore um challenge is that you know geographically sharing a little bit of alpha here but a lot of our users are based in developing markets and so like I've never had a product that had as many users in like India Nigeria Latin America as we do today and so I think the notion that you can take existing proven web 2 games and just package them for this audience is probably false I think their taste will be somewhat different and the smart developers will ship games very quickly so me context go gaming we have a rule that we don't develop anything that can't be shipped in three to four weeks it's longer than that we just don't do it and then if it does well we can add on to it and expand on it I speak to some teams that spending three four months building games and like um I wouldn't say they're on drugs but like it's a incredibly risky and like not very well thought out plan because telegram moves this moves

super fast is probably not quite as fast as crypto but like the taste and The Meta in telegram changes really from month to month right now so I wouldn't overc commend to anything that takes too long yeah I mean again so much to unpack here and I have so many questions because these are the kinds of opportunities that that I mean who knows what will happen with telegram and whether this is truly a you know a new platform but uh I'm always very very excited about these moments and um you know as longtime listeners know uh I always like to drop it in our episodes uh I was at Zinga early zingga and I have to say this feels to me as if this could be another ear like early zingga moment where yeah Facebook opens up their apis to developers you get these really simple casual experiences you remember the Poke and the super poke and you know games like slide uh we you know with really huge name Founders we're basically creating like kind of myspy style like simple um not even game

experiences but those led to something like Farmville which of course was developed very quickly um and very uh with I mean I wouldn't say not great production values they were good production values for the time and for the platform but today we'd look at that and say hoof like why was anybody playing that you know and there was a cow clicker parody that itself got huge amounts of traction which was kind of ironic because the developer of that was trying to make a point about how stupid these games are and it actually ended up being like a big hit so um that's what's interesting to me are what are the what are the circum I mean telegram's been around for quite a while now right I mean it's it's what a decade plus old like so it's not this is not a new it's not new and I mean pav dor famously founded V contact uh you know which was the Facebook clone in Russia and then did telegram um from Dubai or United somewhere like that so that he wouldn't be um chased by by Moscow by Putin but but telegram is not new and yet telegram

games are new right so tell me a little bit about what gave rise to this current wave this explosion almost of of gaming on telegram how old is it and what did they do what did telegram do to open it up I mean I'm not an expert on this but based on my limited knowledge um there's two big things that happened firstly I mean I spoke to some of the team about this so I have kind of you know firsthand info uh some people ass assciated with telegram made a conscious effort to incubate and support these projects last year and so there was like a incubation program uh there was support distribution and advisory and technical stuff um you also have the integration of the wallet natively which you know made Apple and Google somewhat IR rate they had to introduce kind of other forms of third party payment so they had an inbuilt crypto wallet which was just natively accessible by your mini apps you could just do payments around the app stores um unfortunately

that's not not survivable today but that was running for a few months um and then they overhaul the uh the way the apps work so they they created a framework for developing your own mini apps it wasn't just like a casual browser window so it's a combination of like infrastructure support and also just giving people the tools to to distribute these games and then you know when if you think like you've had nocoin hamster combat and CM and the smallest one of the series cism with about 30 million players will take off in the last few months I mean that's a great proof of concept for everyone else and so we were earlyish like we decided in February March this year that we were going to go all in uh and developing on go start in April and the bot's ready in August and we already have multiple games in the pipe and my only regret is actually we didn't start this at the end of last year start sooner but yeah yeah well there sometimes such a thing is too early and sometimes there's such a thing

as too late and sometimes the difference is a mere matter of weeks or months especially when you have a new platform um same exact thing happened with uh you know Facebook platform you know you had to be one of the very first uh ideally you had to be Zinga um in order to be uh a viable winner and then uh once the virality goes away which by the way we'll talk about that like it's it's amazing for right now but how long will it last and you know when will if ever will telegram start monetizing but we won't talk to that that just yet we'll we'll talk a bit more about um your game now because I want to hear about the experience as a game developer what is it like to to build on telegram it's it's new the tools um and you've got these interesting features such as the the giant broadcast feature which is one of the things I mentioned in the intro that makes telegram unique um you know where you can broadcast things to hundreds of thousands of people in these big groups um which is not possible um on technically even possible uh because of the uh the encryption standards I'm no

technical expert but hardfork one of my favorite New York Times podcasts uh they they cover this in in quite a bit of detail when the uh French arrest came so I recommend everybody go listen to to that episode and read up listen up on listen up huh interesting yeah read up listen up um on on what uh what makes telegram technically interesting because that actually is not as secure um as most people think it is but that is actually the thing that makes it possible to to reach so many people so talk a little bit about as a developer what are the things you've had to learn and unlearn from your other development efforts uh for building on telegram we were actually quite lucky because M action heroes initially launched on browser so it was our very first browser game as a independent studio and I took the decision in 2022 that the lead platform for M action heroes would be browser rather than mobile which was kind of a contrarian bet but I was concerned by what Apple and Google might on the web 3 side and I

wanted to make sure that we had the maximum flexibility for the product we just get the product right before we move it to mobile uh and so with that experience in hand when we started building on telegram like it was basically react plus telegrams and libraries and so on the react side we built out a lot of that stuff before on the web 3 side so it's a combination of their own technology plus react to do the call B and then the games themselves you know there are different things you can do because essentially it launches is in a sub window um we build most our games in unity actually using a webg wrapper um but uh you can also do it in H5 so like we also have games on Goat gaming which are buil in HMR 5 and I'm very you know being very candid that probably preferable but you know sh like hours has got almost 10 years worth of assets and code already in unity and so we'll reuse those as much as possible if you're starting from fresh I recommend probably doing HTML 5 just because the BS faster and is is uh more lightweight

I think the thing to remember as well is when so many of your users are playing in developing markets I mean we've seen that some of the data on the devices they're using you know you're seeing like 12y old Android uh processors on some of these phones so uh you know if you're casting fancy shadows and kind of 3D objects in your telegram game then maybe you know a very small percentage of your potential player base actually should be able to enjoy it right right interesting um so that that's an interesting Factor actually why is it that it's in large part uh or larger percentage developing uh Market or Emerging Market um you mentioned India Nigeria uh is it the crypto component here are these play to earn games to a certain degree what's what what what's explaining that I think this is a combination of both the things you just said so um actually it's kind of three things so developing markets tend to be more future forward so I've been living in Asian enough 12 years and so know people

in say Europe and the US don't have issues with payments right like you want to do a payment by PayPal go to bank like it's pretty low friction lot countries that's just not the case like maybe you live a 100 miles from your nearest bank and you you don't have the right documents to open a bank account or I don't know it's it's not you can't get a credit card so for a lot of these people like crypto has become the default uh telegram does make crypto payments and interactions very easy like it's kind of like I said it's built natively into the product and so I heard some incredible data points around uh usdt which is you know stable coin usage in Nigeria and how people just use Telegram and USD for a lot of their daily stuff now um because you know they have currency issues and banking is a challenge and whatever else um I also think people in Southeast Asian developing markets are less entrenched in the existing messaging systems so they're more willing to try out

something like telegram rather than like oh you know my parents my grandparents and my school buddies are on WhatsApp or whatever um with USI message um so I think it's those two I think the play to un component also helps like if you look historically a lot of the skill gaming platforms have done very well in Southeast Asia and India and so this's chance to win even if it's just a small amount amount of money by beating other players uh resonates very well in these markets so you know skills is obviously a huge business in the US but mobile Premier League in India is a household name like the average americanum has never heard of skills right maybe you know some people that are into sports betting or gaming may have but like npl is really like everywhere there so interesting yeah that's often the case uh we hear that hear that a lot I think um you know our podcast host on navic in general is mostly based in us and Europe um in those two specifically and I have to say that uh you know I I

certainly have some blinkers on about what's emerging you know I try to look to see what's going on especially in Asia Asian markets I think they are very future forward I mean it was always the case that in freetop playay Mobile you know it was always the case that like China and uh Korea were you know quite a bit ahead Japan quite a bit ahead of where the Western markets are going to go and Western tastes were going to follow and uh you know it was always a case of looking to see what's top grossing from 10 cent um and and seeing okay what of that can we take and adapt um and adopt for for Western tastes um uh let's talk more about your actual game um you you mentioned some stats and um you know gameplay how do you monetize where are you getting your users like how have you gone to two million players and how you measuring players by the way um from you know five weeks ago to now well you I'm not going to dulge too much of the secret Source but um I mean the game has strong social mechanics so if a

player refers we took the Facebook Playbook man a player refers a certain amount of users there are certain rewards available we have Raffles and competitions where you have to you know refer five people to qualify um there are certain communities we've partnered with as well so just like in web 3 you can exchange player bases and say okay we're going to promote your game you promote hours I think the famous example of this is Clash of Clans in Japan I think they partnered with puzzles dragons for correctly back in the day um was one of the few Western games to do one in Japan um and then there's you know you can do bits with Payway as well so we've been doing experiments with different platforms like you can actually advertise natively within telegram too uh it's early days the existing tools are not fantastic like you wouldn't compare them to to Google or meta's offerings but um look it is what it is and the smart teams will figure ways out

to either work around the tools or build build their own tools or or find ways to kind of find out for the so there's lots of different channels you can do but you have to be willing to get creative and Scrappy if you're use acquisition team is just expecting to replicate you know the current Instagram strategy like you're going to have a bad time yeah no I mean and this is the thing with new platforms it's always you're you have to be prepared even to bend the rues sometimes perhaps even break the rules sometimes um as as has a scrappy uh young team and that's why the larger incumbents you know from the web 2 or or traditional air quotes traditional gaming world uh they have such a hard time uh cracking new platforms and again TBD if telegram is truly a new platform I think you know because it's so early yes the adoption of these games is crazy but a lot of it is incentivized it sounds like you know with with some cryptos and play to earn um monetization actually that brings me on to that H how are you monetizing if at all um your player base and how are others if you're not then how are others doing it are

they are you seeing some interesting monetization models uh arising that are perhaps very different to what you see in traditional gaming I mean be very candid with you like we've been focused on growth so I'd say we're not even at the beginning of our monetization journey um but if you look how I mean some of the numbers I saw around kazen in terms of monetization like very impressive and so people you know been doing the usual kind of free-to-play monetization they've been offering season passes progression uh you know pay to unlock certain items you have a merge game there is a pretty clear playwork you know challenge you have is a lot of these people in Emerging Markets so do you have variable pricing do you do bundles um do you monetize ad viws because some people are now serving ads in these games as well I saw one game that's basically quite similar to coin master and they were like you know if you wanted to have more spins you watch ads um yeah many different ways you can monetize these players you know some of

these games are doing eight figures in Revenue a year now so it's not a small thing and if you have that audience in that player base like you can either find ways to monetize as eyeballs or make them pay for Content so it's yeah I mean if you got 20 30 million users like you should be able to build some kind of viable business there uh I I think Playing devil's advocate though it sounds like a lot of this is is growth based right now there's like a a go rush so to speak because it's a it is a new frontier and the scrappy teams are recognizing like okay there's there's opportunity in them heels right so his gold to be mind now the the key question really becomes and this is this was true for web 3 I mean I was there myself I saw it firsthand there is an opportunity to grow quite quickly right grow your community grow your play Air quotes player base uh grow your user base um but and this may not hold true but it has I think in the history of gaming you know retention retention retention that does matter retention and engagement matters so yes you can grow very quickly

um I mean I remember very clearly Zing games not all of them did well we had Mafia Wars 2 for example bless Eric Bethy who was the GM of that that game uh I thought did a great job but we grew that very quickly to millions of Da and then it had terrible retention unfortunately and and it tanked so what's the what's the Playbook there in terms of retention or is it just too early to say like are the the same key metrics that that hold in free-to-play gaming um do they hold in telegram too yeah I mean retention as you say is key right and so a lot of people you know I think it's it's complicated to draw a direct parallel with mobile freeo play because the audience is different so it's delivery mechanism but I mean you're looking at you know your day one day three ratio your day three to day seven ratio and day seven to day 30 ratio and also on a cohort basis and so I mean look I'm looking right now actually at some of the data I'll drop you some alha so our

longest cohort which is five week is currently retaining at like 22% which is pretty good yeah that's very solid yeah that's legit so it's interesting actually one of the things we've observed is that um the users that hang around are very very loyal I guess because they feel some kind of investment and we have a lot of the social stuff built in but yeah um like you say there's no good getting like tens of millions of users and then expecting them just to retain by you know the the power of magic um I guess the only other thing I would say is you actually raised point because like you I'm old enough to remember Mafia wars I and actually remember the differences between Mafia wars and mafew Wars I I actually touched on something you said at the very beginning and it's like better production values don't necessarily equate to a better or performing experience with these less hardcore players and that's true in hyper casual as well and so what I expect to see in the next few months is

teams that have spent I don't know four six months building something incredibly polished just getting wrecked because the players are not looking for that um I remember speaking to someone at Voodoo like years ago and they said Yeah the more polished games don't actually perform as well they don't convert as well because players are instant like less kind of hardcore players are just put off by that so I always thought that was quite interesting yeah and I mean I think it comes back to something you said as well which is hey a lot of these players are in veloping emerging markets and their devices may not be able to handle the graphics right um I mean that was part of the problem actually even with Mafia Wars 2 you know the Facebook canvas just couldn't like it would load really slowly and you know it it had Hardware limitations and so that's just something to keep in mind is like the lighter weight it is the faster it's going to load and the quicker you're going to get to the actual gameplay the core Loop and get to experience it instead of having to sit there waiting for a loading screen like spinning spinning spinning um if it's even able to handle it um in terms of binary size

and what have you so so that's a really interesting um interesting Factor as well um where are these teams coming from by the way who are building these things I mean yes they're all going to be Scrappy Crews like they're all going to have maybe some crypto web 3 experience maybe not I'm making assumptions here no okay interesting my assumption was was gonna be this was kind of a uh almost like an evolution from the web 3 crypto world where you know maybe some of these web three games were not getting traction I mean very similar to to Mighty Baker right um where maybe you didn't get quite where you wanted to and then you see this opportunity you're like oh okay let's pivot into that right um who are these teams and and where are they coming from yeah it's an interesting one so I mean on my action heroes the challenge we had actually was just distribution like how can we cost effectively put this in the hands of millions of players and in web three today like for mobile app your options are very limited it's either you go the paida route or you you know throw money at K's and you hope that that converts into a community or installs or

know some other kind of magic um and so yeah I mean telegram was a way to do Mass distribution so and you're seeing other web 3 Studios doing that you know there's a there's a studio I'm a fan of um it's the a seed studio uh they made a farm game called Farm friends I've been playing which is kind of a cute Farmville esque SL meets crypto tape on Telegram uh but then also and I think this is dangerous as well for reasons I'll explain but like you seeing this massive influx of WeChat game developers because the thinking is that oh we've already built successful games and one messaging out like we're just going to play the same Playbook and I don't think it's that straightforward I think the audience the audience is fundamentally very different and the behaviors are different so that concerns me slightly because I just like I said I think the two platforms are actually quite different so a lot of people going in with false like strong assumptions it's

like me saying oh it's going to be the same as Facebook gaming which which isn't it's his own thing uh so you're seeing an influx of players from sorry devs from WeChat you're seeing uh yeah web3 Studios and then I've also started to see Social Casino and kind of hardcore mobile freetop playay guys coming in as well that just like you know what I don't want to play the idfa game anymore I don't want to be you know giving know 80% of my uh Topline revenues to Facebook and Google for ads like let's let played a different game and so it's a combination of like kind of disgruntled veterans yeah WeChat and web three developers interesting interesting yeah I mean it's funny mention Social Casino I was a Social Casino developer myself in the earlier days of of mobile uh 2013 so not super early not play ticket early but early enough and yeah that's you always see that um the folks who are prepared to mess around with Casino mechanics and uh you know gacha

and things like that are are typically one of the first teams to to go after New Opportunities like this so it's so got a little chuckle out of me for that um those guys are hardcore man I have a lot of respect for the social you know guys like they are they are probably the best of the best in a lot of respects yeah yeah yeah um could not disagree with that um okay so how the the very top game now you've grown to 2 million in 5 weeks but we've got some of the early clear entrance like hamster combat and the larger ones you mentioned the largest one allegedly has 100 million how are these numbers tracked uh are there any kind of thirdparty analytics is there an app Annie or you know um uh similar for for telegram for for actually verifying some of these things can you yeah of course yeah so you can just actually go to any given bot and it will show you how many monthly users they've had so I'm looking at NCoin now my phone uh it's 8.5 five 7even six million users in the last

month it will show you like the monthly actives it typically runs on a 48 hourish delay uh so you know if you're adding users regularly like it'll be a bit behind but yeah I mean you can see within telegram itself how these games are doing okay and the biggest ones how have they got that big that quickly that's a good question I'm looking at hand C right now they're 108 million in the last month um the biggest ones have done it through offering rewards basically for incentives but the other thing they've done which is very smartly is like hamster con a great example of this they built an incredible social media presence so their YouTube channel has got an insane amount of followers uh and so these businesses okay you could argue that you know you just offered incentives to buy users whatever but there would be the grumpy web to take right uh but they' built these massive followings and now they're leveraging those eyeballs that keep growing their business so you know you're seeing them do Partnerships with

other games other businesses they're setting ads on the social media channels like it's uh I'm not going to share the numbers I've heard some numbers in the last few weeks because there was token 2049 in Singapore last week so it's nice to have everyone come to us um but the numbers these teams are doing just through the size of their Community is just eye watering so it's a great business yeah I know you know one of the things I noticed I I haven't I played hamster coma that's literally the only one I've played uh and I'll you know confess and this is part of the reason I think like I'm usually you know often playing like some of these new things but it's so new that I even I haven't had a chance to to mess around much but Hamer combat is is the one that I heard of and maybe our listeners if they've heard of telegram games that's the one they've heard of too and it's it is interesting because their social media game is like on fire right it's incredible it's not dissimilar actually from from web 3 some of the top collections um you know again they had to be pretty early but you know um Bard Apes of course famously uh pudgy Penguins is a really interesting because um you know they've been able to kind of parlay their early earliness uh and the

cuteness of their collection into some kind of brand SL social media presence which is which is fascinating so again TBD if they're like winning air quotes um but but they do have large followings and this seems like it's a similar Playbook to that where you've you've got something that's cute and quirky and interesting that could parlay into a brand or could parlay into something along those lines is that kind of what you're seeing as well I i' say the pudgey penguin story is a bit different because that was a you know quote unquote failed collection That Was Then purchased and kind of bought back from the dead and so it's great it's like everyone loves a comeback story so that's an amazing comeback story and then the idea is that people own the IP for their individual P so there's an IP play there but I think hamster combat as a brand is is just a really interesting kind of case study and I think you're right the social media game is is incredible uh and it's what keeps people with a brand and yeah I mean there's no

reason they can't keep building out this but the other thing I'd say you know people dismiss these games it's just like mid tappers but that's just the onboarding like The Meta game around these games is like incredibly deep like hamster combat has a lot going on and so it's actually very deceptive like it's incredibly welld designed because you start off thinking it's just a casual Tapper it's very accessible and before you know it there like multiple layers of complexity coming in um I you know it's a very spicy statement but I'd say it's like best inclass design as far as I Idol Tapper games got and that also plays a large part interesting interesting okay and who's the team behind hamster combat out of curiosity uh I'm not really sure I'm not sure they even fully doxed to be honest I was gonna say because I tried I looked into hamster combat I actually wanted to have them on the show as well uh because I again that's the story I've been following that's initially where I got like clued into telegram games and I was like oh this looks interesting these numbers are quite uh interesting um and

I couldn't really find out much about that team so listeners if you know who the Hampshire combat team is I would love to have those guys on the show as well um hit me up afterwards nvic.org messaging apps which can only handle thousands or maybe tens of thousands but not hundreds of thousands um of kind of listeners slf followers in these channels um are developers tapping into the social aspect you mentioned some of the stuff that you've got going on um what does telegram allow you to do via their API or other tools in order to tap into TR like true social not you know just like Facebook games and Zinga games were not really air quotes social in many cases they were just like I could broadcast to everybody on my friend list um and get my parts for Frontier little building that needed to be repaired or whatever right but that's not really

social that's kind of like asking for parts but effective right um so curious to hear how the social differs in in telegram games uh and what telegram is doing and what developers are doing to tap into the unique features of the platform that's an interesting question because I mean on the surface it's not that different to what's gone before it this messaging app you can share one link with your friends and they can jump into the same match as you and they can help help you and become part of your clan so I think versus Mobile gaming is that's a lot more instantaneous and more friction you don't have to install anything you just jump straight in um as a Dev you can have broadcast Community channels directly with your users which is pretty cool actually you could argue that's not very different to Facebook groups uh back in the day but it feels a lot more obviously it's real time right you're speak you can just speak directly to your community and hang out with them so it's kind of like a almost like a mash up between like Discord and Facebook back in the day um to be very

Frank with you in terms of social features there still a lot of work to do one of the things I would like us to start doing is to maybe build social features around people owning specific nfts within the ecosystem as well creating their own kind of like little gated communities you can token gate them and maybe taking some of the web three Playbook and doing inative stuff around that but um it's still very early days right no one has really cracked anything that's very Innovative or kind of groundbreaking on the social front it's just incredibly low friction to play with your friends and to share with your friends and for now that's good enough yeah yeah yeah early platform stuff okay uh what are you seeing telegram doing uh I mean they they must they famously have a tiny team I think they have like 20 employees they're um so they don't have a lot of presumably resources in order to dedicate to um like platform support you know you don't have like the the platform team that's like hundreds of people or thousands of of people these days at Facebook and other you know even in the early days they had much larger teams than that so

what do you well let's put it this way what would you like to see telegram do as a developer to make it easier to build on Telegram and tap into more uh even more users and and more gameplay opportunities I mean despite them being a small team there's always a lot of improvements coming there's also you know a foundation around around Tom just the blockchain and they uh have helped incubate tooling and so I think going to see a lot of innovation on that front I think ways just to again like keep streamlining payments keep streamlining distribution and keep stream lighting social be really fun it'd be really cool if people could have voice chat with their friends right multiplayer uh you know unified system we're probably going to build this ourselves to be honest across all of go but unified friends list like something that starts to look like Xbox FL for example so that every game developer doesn't go have to go off and build friends and Clans and girls and leaderboards like this all the stuff

that we're building now or we have but obviously if that stuff was out the box like it is on steam or Xbox then you would start to see a lot more Innovation around the social kind of multiplayer side which is really what gives telegram a huge Edge and will increase it further you know I think for me I'm not going to make many friends saying this but one of one of the big like fumbles of the last 10 years it's just a game center on Apple so you used to have a friends list it just just disappeared as far as I can tell it doesn't really work uh there's no leaderboards I guess because P you know there not and privacy makes it hard but like man there could have been such a huge unlock for mobile game developers if the tools just worked just did like the absolute bare minimum and there is a chance for telegram to do this well I think you're going to make a lot of friends in the developer commun saying that I think maybe not at Apple but uh certainly at in the game development I

100% agree I mean that's one of the biggest things that would have unlocked I think a lot more creativity and um the ability to grow distribution now Apple maybe doesn't want that you know like they don't want the free distribution that social gives you because if you can access your your friend list right that then you do have access to people who are more likely than not to at least click on that notification you know if it comes from Simon to nio and vice versa so um so that's the cynical and me and and the cynic and me thinks telegram might recognize that too it seems like all platforms do at some point I mean Facebook famously had uh you know Facebook and Zinga famously had the mark and Mark meeting where you know Zuckerberg and pinkas would meet literally I think on a weekly basis that's how important Zinga was and then as soon as uh uh Facebook had outgrown Zinga and was able to dictate the terms of course free virality gets shut off uh very handily the quarter after the IPO which was a very annoying time um but uh you know you know and then suddenly the good days uh are are gone so curious to

hear your thoughts on how telegram might be thinking about these things based on what you're seeing like the signals um in the mix because you know pav durov is is an interesting character because he doesn't seem to care about money very much I mean he doesn't seem to care about monetizing telegram particularly so there is a world in which this could be a an open Frontier for quite a bit longer than some of these other platforms let the good times roll green look the clue is in the right ton stands for the open network um I can't I there were people I speak to there and like the interactions with how them have been overwhelmingly positive I think uh I think philosophically just very different to you know the Legacy platforms Legacy Distribution on mobile um so that's not something we worry about a great deal at this moment in time um the other thing is that look this is built in react and HML 5 so it's

not very difficult to Port elsewhere if um if platform just becomes impossible for whatever reason or is not available or like something goes badly wrong like it's not that you're locked into I don't know like a iOS specific app or anything like that so know like we don't worry particularly about platform risk obviously it's always there right platform risk exists no matter what you're doing if you're building physical Goods you have supply chain same risk um but the people we've interacted with and the interactions we've had with the the network and the foundation have been fantastic and I think we're aligned in in terms of vision of just bringing this to to the world and not having to it's really nice to be able to reson app and not have to go through a review process could take up to two weeks and you know you get your app rejected and you don't know why you get like one line that doesn't really explain what it was and then you can just keep resubmitting and hope it's right or you can spend the next week trying to track someone down to help you out right it's nice you just

press a button and it's deployed like play this so uh no it's uh it's honestly just a much much better developer experience yeah that sounds nice I I I envy you we we're going through um with our current product we're trying to integrate stripe into it and uh good luck oh my God they just keep coming back with like they won't tell you what's wrong they'll tell you they won and and so then you just you're playing guess with them you know and and it's very frustrating and of course the oper process famously is is as well so no I envy you and uh and you're press a button and off it goes into the wild um love the sound of that um okay what are the biggest impediments do you think um for G now the one thing I'm going to put out there kind of as a as a seed and you can tell me if I'm right or wrong but I mean telegram does have for the C like the Casual Observer a pretty bad reputation in terms of what's happening on the platform now I know that's totally sep from I know but I'm just going to put it out there as a and I

want to see your reaction which was shaking your head by the way um yeah tell me a little bit about is that is that a risk is there like an association risk um and that could be an opportunity because that means that the big guys with big budgets just won't go there because they're they're too worried about the the association with telegram so interested to hear what the biggest piece of that you you think is either true or or false and if so tell me why yeah I don't I don't really worry about about it cuz I'm old enough to remember when people say that about the internet to remember people saying that about Bitcoin but Bitcoin was only for criminals and drug dealers and whatever else uh and for me it's just anything that is kind of new technology that threatens incumbents always gets slapped with this label and these kind of accusations so I don't really lose any seep over it um if the incumbents are hesitant like you said that's an advantage I'm veryy happy for them to take their time also you know

historically incumbents have been pretty crappy at platform shifts I I was working at Ubisoft when they started thinking about Mobile in 2012 and they're still thinking about it in 2024 um EA never really n nailed mobile right I mean they kind of did a bit with real with Acquisitions you know they acquired five monkeys in Australia that's a great studio um but other than that I haven't done a great deal so you know I'm not I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to come into telegram but no I don't really worry about the association and I looked at some data seem with the news like instes actually went up downloads um so no news is uh no news is necessarily bad news right and so uh now um as more people also start to use the app and you know there's been some statements made recently about uh compliance with information requests uh I think in the long run all these things will give us more clarity and stronger

footing so I don't worry about it a great deal okay okay um a a related question is this then which is is it Venture fundable um and and does it do you even need Venture funding um I I haven't read of any single investment or VC investment specifically into telegram games now Studios like I know you've had some Venture funding in the in the past I think that's correct to say so there are obviously Studios who have out or or working in telegram who have had Venture funding but I think predating the telegram boom or MINI BOOM at least for the time being I'm curious to hear whether that's that's a consideration is that something you're thinking about um do you know of anything in the pipeline yeah VC mentality they can be very risk I mean they're risk taking in some ways but they can be very risk averse in these types of situations where there is that potential reputation SL Association risk you know I was speaking to a fairly high-profile gaming investor actually a mutual friend of ours looks a bit like Ryan goling um and he said to me it's very

recently he said to me the only game studos I'm investing in or really like seriously looking at or on telegram um and so VCS are looking at this very closely and already starting to deploy I know of at least two Studios with telegram thesis that have been backed recently um because there's you know going back to everything we've reced right if you're going to develop on PC console like it's eight figure budgets uh multi-year timeline and then maybe it goes to zero like very good chance it goes to zero maybe have a hit but it's incredibly difficult yeah you're investing in Mobile freeo play like you really probably need an eight figure budget to start as well like you know got scop you got to be a scopely with a I mean Monopoly goes they you name me another hit game and and that one took how many years that they developed I mean good good for them and it's a phenomenal it's phenomenal that there can still be success in such a saturated Market but not for a scrappy N9 person Studio no chance no that's right and so

I think early stage gaming investors are basically like looking very and actually I met one recently that was here in Asia and saying I'm looking to meet telegram Studios like who can you introduce us to uh so there's definitely a lot of appetite from the investor Community but it's not just the case of like building a react app like you actually have to spend time in telegram um I'm just going to pull up my phone phone and look at screen time just to give you an idea how much time I spend telegram every day because it is like quite concerning um so if I look here I am spending old man looks on phone this is great viewing um this is this is a great segment for our listeners who are listening which is the majority of our listeners listen on podcasts uh as opposed to watching on YouTube so so daily average for me is like uh nearly three hours a day in Telegram yeah but I mean the flip side of that is you need to be telegram native

essentially as a developer like that's the key here right and and you know if you come from the outside in and this is why I was asking about the web 3 component and the crypto component because telegram of course was adopted heavily heavily heavily by the crypto community and the web 3 Community um and you you know that gave developers if you were a game developer like yourself a almost like an edge because you were there and you were like oh this is interesting like I can do this thing so now too late almost to start going in there which brings me to kind of one of our my final questions here um before we get to some of the fun stuff um do you think telegram assuming the thesis holds assuming that telegram can continue to to grow uh can continue to uh retain um do you think like an a Zinga or an EA can emerge something as big as that from from telegram I mean Zinga did emerge Zing is a pretty big company it's not huge but it's a pretty big company um it emerged from a brand new platform from scratch right um we haven't seen many of

those since then yeah um and web 3 of course famously still has yet to deliver any really big big hits so um curious to hear if telegram could be a birthing ground so to speak um for a big industry giant which then of course can go in many directions once you're big enough you can then go to mobile and you can go to freet to play and you go wherever you want yeah I mean look you know our vision is essentially to do tell what we check into Mobile gaming so to really kind of have that level of scale multiple Studios that you're publishing and kind of dominating that space so it's like a very big har audacious goal um and if I didn't believe that was the possibility we just wouldn't be here so yeah we we're fully into that I think the challenge for the larger companies is that telegram really moves so fast I mean I keep saying it but we're deploying builds more than once a week and we're shipping games in under four weeks and you know having worked to big companies big listed companies like the

ones you mentioned it's just I have zero faith that they can ship anything that fast like it takes them multiple weeks just to make a decision so like you know shipping two three updates a week and shipping games in three weeks like that's that's the kind of speed you need to operate at you need to be super plugged into the ecosystem you need to be watching everything that's happening day in day out and they need to be checking sentiment on X and Discord and all these other channels and Tik Tok right that requires a work ethic and a level of focus and ability to move fast that is basically anatha to most publicly well every publicly listed company I can think of I mean if if you have to have a green light meeting you know you're moving too slow yeah that's then you're screwed like say no more green light that word alone that's it it's funny you know we had a ufn team I'm just going to digress slightly and the Genesis of our telegram products actually came from that so we were just

doing some experiments in ufn more for R&D and there one restriction I placed on the team was like need to ship a new map every week and they're like this is mad we need at least six weeks I was like no no no you get one week and so you need to rework all your tools to make sure you can do this and so we build out this pretty mad gen pipeline we started in 2022 um and yeah I think that experience actually gave us the discipline to be able to doing what we're doing on telegram today if we hadn't gone through that trauma and so that actually ended up helping them you need that kind of approach no Absolut absolutely you need to be incredibly hungry and Incredibly plugged in and I mean really you can't have a big team a big team is going to be a hindrance I think in this in this scenario you need tiny little teams that can just move independently um kind of you know supercell style or uh you know just not the big 100 person 200 person studio um that's probably going to hold you back so um okay just on that point quickly I sat down with the ufn team

just going to digress very slightly a few weeks actually a few months ago and I said if you were the CEO today would you keep building ufn Maps or would you just still go work on telegram because you think that's the bigger opportunity for the company and actually the team decided to disband what they were working on and everyone start working on Telegram and so we still do little bits on the site but like the team themselves took that decision to like maximize their resources and their output and that's the kind of focus you need yeah yeah yeah I hear you uh well kind of final question on the on the telegram front here um what does Discovery look like on Telegram and and especially as you get saturated with more and more games I mean this is the the challenge like it's exciting to have a new opportunity but the new opportunity is a gold rush and it attracts you know the the developers and it attracts the Pix and shovel makers and you know it attracts lots of different folks and that just makes it harder for Discovery and then you start CL even if the distribution channels are there they start getting clogged right they start getting very hard to break through um in the in the way that you know hamster combat and and you know you guys and and

some of the early movers have have been able to do so you know fast forward six months from now you know if you can even predict that far into the future with such a fast moving platform um you know what does Discovery look like what do you see happening to the channels that are currently available to you what do you see happening to some of the tactics I mean early web 3 is a great example of this you know it was that the T there was a Playbook and it worked for the early movers you know follow me on Twitter you know get some crypto so you know join my Discord you know there was a Playbook and it worked right like you get some of the early developers got huge you know audiences you know they were able to reach a lot of people through X or Twitter um and Discord and did well from that perspective TBD how well they do on the product side um but those channels got completely saturated and that play got Playbook got completely overplayed and at that point that that was dead right so yes of course you can still grow there through other means but but like that early Playbook I think I see that happening to telegram but I want to hear your thoughts on that actually I would have to disagree

there is no playwork on telegram there's a telegram App Center um I just looked it had 3.2 million monthly active users which is a large number but by telegram standards not huge um and so every app has to figure out its own distribution method on telegram uh and how they can drive referrals and drive community activities here and Partnerships and there is no playbook for this stuff you know I it's not like the old days where basically you would go to your nearest Apple representative to their office and you pitch them the game and You' show what your building you get their feedback and then you do everything in your power to get featured and then if you were featured prior to what 2017 before they you know redid the App Store killed Discovery um you were golden like you had hundreds of of thousands maybe millions of installes and it was like basically whole companies were built off the back of

featuring right um that doesn't happen on telegram today but you just have to go out and find your own audience so yeah um there is no no Playbook that's going to be clogged up anytime soon I actually kind of wish a Playbook would emerge then I you my dark eye circles wouldn't be as deep because we're constantly trying to find new ways to keep hacking and growth but it's also really exciting it's really fun like you know fortune favors the brave and just get in there and try stuff and it won't work out and then all of a sudden you're like oh like we got so million users in five weeks what's what's happened love it love it so I mean essentially what you're saying is for any developer um going out there you have to go zero to one every single time there's there's no I can ride on the shoulders of giants kind of thing now obviously you can kind of look at what you think might have worked for another developer and and uh adapt that to your own need it sounds like but but uh zero to one like you got to have a zero to one mentality going into telegram I think uh yeah the other thing I'd say is actually like the one thing it shares

with crypto is that attention spans really short and whatever Playbook worked for that team you're looking at I can promise you is already out date by the time you're trying to copy out yeah yeah yeah no that was absolutely um uh that was the crypto experience I had for sure um yeah yeah the The Meta changed every few weeks um if if even that long um okay well we're we're at time here um I've had most of my questions answered but this this is definitely a really really really really interesting um topic for me uh I would love to have you back um once you've got some more metrics and we've seen that the platform evolve you know maybe for a few months or so it may happen even sooner than that sounds like it's moving very fast um so ask all our guests uh what three games are you currently playing or are you most excited about and these don't have to be on Telegram in fact well I would like to have at least one tegram because then we have the expert Simon who knows the space better than anybody

else telling us like what is the game that we should go check out so look I'm obviously going to self-nominate I think everyone should go to play Sorry goat gaming bot and play a couple rounds of waiu clash which is a waiu themed card battler I think Farm Friends Friends spell f sorry F sorry it's really late it's after midnight f r NS F friends m is really fun it's a very cute take on the farm genre like I said mixing with crypto I think the guys from bbot I don't even know them I'm going to give them a shout out because they've done a very cute uh extremely cheeky like quite edgy take coin master and I love the sense of humor with the the machine and all that kind of thing maybe not one to give to your kids um and then you know away from telegram what am I playing I'm playing a lot of Solitaire games because we may or may not have solitire product coming um I've been playing black myth uh which I really you

know I really love those kind of games black myth is a slightly different take uh but I'm enjoying it and I'm also uh play I'm pre-release playing EA FC 25s because I'm was on the beta so I've been enjoying that as well I'm just ready like practicing for when they open the floodgates on Friday so I can beat the NES all right all right well that's more than three so I appreciate that you've you've given us extra bonus Alpha um uh so uh yeah so anyway thank you so much Simon it was a real real pleasure I've learned a ton I know our listeners will have learned a ton as well this is a fast moving space this is a potentially new Major Distribution platform you heard it from Simon there are definitely some Venture opportunities here if you're looking to start a studio or raise funding it sounds like that's definitely a possibility the telegram thesis is real and is being believed in it seems by the money the money men and the money women um so thank you very much for coming on the novic gaming podcast it has been really a joy my pleasure man have a good one speak soon

yep and a big thank you as always to our listeners we'll be back next week with more interviews more insights and more analysis from the weird and wonderful world of gaming and now telegram gaming which I'm excited by so until next time friends feel free to send questions guest recommendations and comments to me my email is nn. if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or give a fstar review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov. or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what navic has to offer make sure to check out our website www. nvic.org dovic docco thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode