An interesting game can indeed quickly attract players and achieve success in the short term, but fun itself is usually not enough to correctly evaluate a project. Blockchain game projects that are truly developed and achieve long-term success all rely on a solid technical foundation.
Although on-chain games and engines are still in their early stages, the gaming sector in the Telegram x TON ecosystem has recently attracted attention from both inside and outside the circle with its huge user scale and traffic. In particular, The Open League (TOL) launched by the TON Foundation has provided many outstanding projects with the opportunity to show their talents. Among them, Catizen, which has won the first place for three consecutive sessions, has impressed people with its strong technical strength.
The hottest cat chain game in the Ton ecosystem launches the Play2Airdrop mode
Catizen is a Web3.0 social entertainment platform on Telegram, aiming to create a Web3 decentralized consumer application that integrates mini-games, short dramas, and e-commerce. Its current core is a cat game Catizen (Cat Citizen) built on the TON ecosystem. The game combines the metaverse, GameFi and AI. The game launched a revolutionary Play2Airdrop mode, where players can earn future airdrops while playing.
Since the Beta version was launched on March 19, 2024, the number of Catizen players has exceeded 22.5 million, the number of on-chain users has approached 1.3 million, the number of daily active players has exceeded 3.5 million, and the number of paying users has reached 500,000. The latest data shows that the total number of Catizen on-chain users has exceeded 1.25 million, and it has ranked first in the TON Open League for three consecutive seasons.
It is no exaggeration to say that Catizen is definitely a top blockchain game project in the Telegram x TON ecosystem. Sasha, the founder of Notcoin, the original Tap 2 Earn project, said in a previous interview that in the current era of a large number of Telegram Clicker imitations, he is only optimistic about the sustainability of Catizen.
Dedicated game engine and SDK create a solid technical foundation
Catizen’s short-term success seems unexpected, but it is actually reasonable. Unlike other blockchain game competitors that invest heavily in advertising, Catizen’s native growth relies on its solid technical infrastructure.
1. Trinity Catizen exclusive game engine
Compared with Gaming Bot competitors that rely on third-party game engines, Catizen has built its own game engine, Catizen Game Engine, which is designed specifically for Telegram applets. It currently supports three unique features: high-performance millisecond-level multi-threaded loading, data tracking, and global distributed loading technology.
Catizen's high-performance millisecond-level multi-threaded loading utilizes multi-threaded asynchronous loading to improve game performance, multi-core processors for parallel computing, reduces main thread blocking, speeds up game startup, ensures smooth scene transitions, and brings a seamless experience to players.
Catizen data tracking platform has built-in real-time data analysis, multi-dimensional data mining and machine learning functions, optimize game content, improve user retention rate, and increase payment conversion rate. It supports custom reports and real-time monitoring to drive decision-making with data.
Catizen's global distributed loading technology supports integration with the global content delivery network (CDN), using intelligent edge computing and regional caching to ensure fast resource allocation and low-latency downloads. Players can enjoy a high-quality gaming experience no matter where they are.
From a technical perspective, Catizen's game engine is designed to be lightweight, which allows the game to run smoothly on devices of different performance levels, especially on mobile devices. Its exclusive game engine supports multiple operating systems and devices, including Android and iOS, allowing players to seamlessly switch game processes on different devices through Telegram. Due to the optimized integration with Telegram, Catizen uses its API and Bot functions to achieve closer interaction and player social experience.
2. SDK lays a solid foundation for building Catizen ecosystem
Catizen's software development kit provides a one-stop service. Its goal is to allow H5 game developers to achieve one-click publishing on Telegram by accessing the SDK. The whole operation can be achieved in just three steps: create an H5 mini game, connect to the Catizen SDK and game engine, and publish it on the Catizen game center with one click.
In fact, Pluto Studio, the development team behind Catizen, started to invest in the Web2 mini-program game track as early as 2018. They have a lot of successful experience in developing and releasing mini-games. After entering the Telegram Web3 game track, they are more comfortable. It is reported that the Catizen team has signed contracts with 18 popular WeChat mini-games, and will use the team's valuable chain reform experience and rich experience in TON ecological deployment to gradually launch them on the Catizen game platform. Compared with traditional chain game SDKs, Catizen SDK provides a simple way to create and manage Telegram Bots, allowing games to easily implement functions such as message processing, user interaction, and game notifications, such as inline buttons, quick replies, and chatbots, to enhance the interactivity and user experience of the game.
Similarly, Catizen SDK supports multiple operating systems (such as Android, iOS) and devices, enabling developers to create cross-platform gaming experiences, and its concise and powerful API allows developers to efficiently implement various game functions, coupled with the professional technical support of the Catizen team, quickly helping developers to quickly solve problems and improve development efficiency. Through these advantages, Catizen's SDK enables developers to efficiently create high-quality, cross-platform games, while making full use of the characteristics of the Telegram platform to provide rich user interaction and commercialization opportunities.
3. Strong technical barriers make Catizen stand out in market competition
At present, there are quite a few Gaming Bots deployed on Telegram. There are currently more than 300 projects on the TON chain, most of which have built mini-programs on Telegram and accessed through the application center. However, the vast majority of Telegram ecosystem mini-games still maintain "traditional" technical features, such as using the Telegram Bot API for development and supporting H5 interactive experience. This is the technical solution currently adopted by most Telegram mini-program projects, but it will lead to poor ecological scalability and eventually turn itself into an isolated island in the Telegram game ecosystem.
Frankly speaking, most of the current Telegram applets on the market are too dependent on the Telegram platform, which makes them vulnerable to API restrictions, making it difficult to acquire and retain users, and their technical support and development resources are very limited. Their interoperability with other platforms will become increasingly unsatisfactory over time. In contrast, Catizen relies on the Telegram ecosystem, but it does not rely on it. They have built a technical barrier using their exclusive game engine and SDK to build a relatively complete and sustainable full-ecosystem game. It can be said that Catizen's standing out in the fierce market competition is closely related to its strong technical barriers.
Take Catizen's multi-threaded asynchronous loading as an example. This technology is unique in the Telegram game ecosystem and effectively solves the problem of poor gaming experience caused by a large number of players online at the same time. Catizen uses this technology to handle multiple tasks without blocking the main thread, which means that while the user is performing a certain operation, the game can load other content in the background, thereby improving the overall response speed. At the same time, different parts of the game can be loaded at the same time, reducing the time users wait for a certain function or resource to load. This is especially important for games that need to dynamically load a large number of resources to ensure that the game interface remains smooth and responsive during the loading process. Users will not feel that the game is stuck or not smooth because of waiting for resources to load.
The Catizen Content Delivery Network (CDN) brings players a smoother and more stable gaming environment. It caches game content to the server closest to the player through its global server network, significantly reducing delays and improving content loading speed, allowing players to Quickly access game resources no matter where you are. Not only that, compared with other Telegram ecological games that often suffer from freezes and downtime, Catizen uses CDN to effectively share the load of the original server and distribute a large number of requests to multiple cache nodes. This prevents server overload, reduces pressure on the original server, ensures that Catizen games remain stable during high concurrent access, and allows for efficient distribution of game images, audio and video resources.
Moreover, through deep integration of Telegram's various functions, Catizen can provide a seamless and unique user experience. This tight integration enables the game to fully utilize the social features of the Telegram platform, enhance user interaction and stickiness, and then more effectively acquire and retain users. The game can keep in touch with players through message push, group interaction, etc., and increase user return rate.
It is worth mentioning that Catizen's SDK enables developers to quickly develop and iterate game features, so as to quickly make adjustments and optimizations, improve user experience and game life cycle. Efficient resource management and network communication protocols ensure that the game can maintain smooth performance in different network environments, reduce loading time and improve user experience.
In fact, it doesn’t seem too difficult to simply deploy a small game on Telegram, but there are only a handful of projects like Catizen that can respond to various user/market needs in a short period of time, especially in the highly competitive blockchain game field. In layman’s terms: many people want to do it but can’t.
Compared to Telegram ecosystem games built from scratch, Catizen's SDK and game engine greatly reduce the complexity of development, saving a lot of time in game iteration. On the other hand, new smart contract languages may have a certain learning curve, but these languages are often optimized for specific blockchains. For similar products on the market, it usually takes a long time to use new languages (Tact, FUNC) on the TON chain to develop on-chain interactions, debug various functions, and finally optimize the user experience mechanism. By the time it finally reaches the end players, Catizen has already completed functional improvements and multiple rounds of iterations.
To sum it up in one sentence: response speed can determine the flow of users, and the development barrier of game engines lies in experience and first-mover advantage. Today, Catizen has already integrated these technical strengths.
The development route will expand the ecological landscape
Catizen has released a full 12-month development roadmap, which includes six phases in total:
Phase 1: Launch the Catizen game and incentivize users to create crypto wallets through airdrops;
Phase 2: Launch Catizen Launchpool, where users can stake and mine the governance token wCATI Score;
Phase 3: Release Game Center and release more games for users, and support staking CATI;
Phase 4: Launching a short video platform to expand the female user base;
Phase 5: Using the Open Task Platform to attract projects from the TON ecosystem;
Phase 6: Launch an e-commerce platform to expand the application scenarios of CATI tokens.
Judging from the roadmap, Catizen has a very clear future plan, rather than being limited to being a simple Gaming Bot. The clear development roadmap not only improves the transparency of the project, but also clarifies the direction for the long-term development of the project, and makes the crypto community more confident in it.
With strong technical strength, Catizen has become not only a game, but also a community and a movement, where every click and every interaction will contribute to the greater community benefit and ecological development.
