Russian retailers report a surge in massage gun sales amid viral cryptocurrency game Hamster Kombat on Telegram, as players are using massage guns to enhance screen tapping.
According to Russian news site Vedomosti, leading online retailer Wildberries reported a 179% month-on-month increase in massage gun sales in June, while rival site Ozon saw a 33% increase compared to same period last year in sales in June and July so far.
Vedomosti attributes this spike in sales to enthusiastic Hamster Kombat players trying to increase their earnings of in-game virtual currency by using massage guns, which vibrate vigorously to deliver screen taps faster than the player can do naturally. This could be considered a tap monetization exploit, although it could hardly be considered “cheating.”
Retailers — or at least resellers on the sites — seem to have realized this. Many massage gun products from the RELAXA brand had the Hamster Kombat logo stamped onto their product images on Wildberries, responding to this trend while it was still around.
Hamster Kombat has seen explosive growth in recent weeks, expanding far beyond the cryptocurrency market's mainstream user base. Last week, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced that the game had attracted about 239 million players in just under three months.
That's a huge number, but the game's impact on the real world shows its wide reach. In addition to this increase in sales, Hamster Kombat was in the news last month when an Iranian official criticized the game , claiming it was part of the West’s “soft war” and worrying that it will distract citizens from voting in the country's presidential election.
Hamster Kombat is one of the fast-growing Telegram tap-to-earn games that has attracted millions of players in the past few months following the launch of the Notcoin (NOT) token, which started the trend. Hamster Kombat's developers plan to launch a token on The Open Network (TON) at some point this month.
Source: https://tapchibitcoin.io/doanh-so-ban-sung-mat-xa-tai-nga-tang-vot-nho-game-hamster-kombat.html