What does the success of Grand Combat ($GRAND) game teach us

Grand Combat game and its accompanying $GRAND token are currently all the rage. The game has attracted more than 5 million users, the token has risen +8000% in the first hour after the listing (and keeps on growing).

What makes this game and token so successful? And what does that tell us about the overall market and its trends? Let's analyze that and get some valuable lessons.

Grand Combat is a game that's played inside the Telegram messenger. Someone might say it's a disadvantage because it limits the audience only to those who use that messenger. But Telegram is used by almost a billion users. And using it as a game platform has its advantages too: it's easy for players to invite their friends into a game when it's right in the messenger they use to chat with friends.

Grand Combat is not the only successful game in Telegram. There were almost none until 2024, but this year games like Notcoin and Hamster Kombat (both of them crypto-related) made a big splash, with more than 100 million of users in the latter case. 

So the first lesson for us is that Telegram became a successful GameFi platform in 2024.

All of those games use the TON blockchain to create their own tokens. Using it feels natural for a Telegram Mini App because TON and Telegram are historically related and have deep integration. And while TON has been less known that other blockchains like Ethereum, that doesn't stop the tokens from being successful: NOT token by Notcoin got listed on Binance even earlier than Toncoin (the native currency of TON).

We can draw the second lesson: TON emerged as a great solution for GameFi in Telegram.

Why are these games so successful? One of the reasons is the promise of the airdrop. Players know that some time later there will be a token airdrop and the best players can hypothetically get a sizable sum of money. That creates an incentive to try a game and stay an active player for long instead of leaving it aside.

There's a lesson to draw here: in the right context, airdrops can work surprisingly well for user acquisition. 

What all these mentioned games also have in common is using the clicker mechanics. The first thing that player can do in the game is simply tapping on the screen. Each tap earns one point. Those points don't directly transform into airdrop sums, but they still get the player closer to achieving the goals. So that means by tapping you might make yourself a little bit richer. Tapping is a meditative experience by itself, and when people were promised financial rewards related to it, lots of them started to tap all the time — on the subway, in the office and so on.

So it's one more lesson: combining a very simple game mechanic with a financial incentive can be hugely successful.

But people get bored with simple tapping after some time. So the game should offer them something more than that. And Grand Combat is exactly that: the main goal of the game is not earning point by tapping, but investing those points and creating a "passive income" stream of points. When you move deeper in the game, you can stop tapping altogether and still be fulfilled.

That feels like the last lesson for today: you can attract users with a primitive mechanic, but you should provide them with more stuff so they won't get easily bored.

So, Grand Combat checks all these boxes — that's probably why it has so many players and its token price keeps on rising. And that's why it might be interesting both for casual players looking to spend some time and for the investors looking for promising tokens.

The game is available for free on Telegram, it also has an official Telegram channel. 

Token is available on STON.FI DEX (on TON blockchain), and there is a TON/GRAND liquidity pool anyone can participate in.