Alright, let's have an honest talk about mini-games in Telegram. Three years ago, everyone joked that the TON ecosystem was about to take off, but nothing happened. The network was hanging like an airplane stuck on the runway. And then suddenly — boom. Now, mini-games in Telegram have become a real thing, and it's not just hype.

According to Zung Yue, one of the market insiders, there are already at least a hundred games operating in Telegram, and by the end of the month, more than two thousand are expected to launch. Even Telegram itself seems to have not anticipated such a surge. But here’s the question everyone’s asking: how do they make money from this?

It turns out, most of the revenue doesn’t come from the players themselves, but from advertising. This is classic traffic business, and Chinese developers feel right at home here. If you have a new project and need an audience, you go to Web3 task platforms or media outlets. But mini-games in Telegram proved to be much more effective. They are displacing old task platforms simply because there are real people, not bots.

Vertex Capital, for example, invested seriously in this. They developed their own game, Token Hunter, to activate users of their NFT projects. According to their estimates, Telegram mini-games are not just a joke; they could become a market with hundreds of millions of active users per month.

But is there real money from the players themselves? Slipy, founder of Weirdo Ghost Gang, is convinced there is. He’s launching his game OUTA and says that the number of people willing to pay for virtual items far exceeds expectations. Catizen, for example, has raised over $16 million from in-game purchases. These are serious numbers.

Other projects earn about $1.8 million a month just from advertising. Notcoin makes over $300,000 monthly. This shows that Telegram mini-games operate as a hybrid model: advertising plus in-game purchases.

There’s one catch, though. In traditional blockchain games, skins and items cost tens or even hundreds of dollars. That deters regular players. But in Telegram mini-games, you can buy something for $0.99 or $1.99. Many small payments add up to big profits. It works.

Slipy believes that Telegram mini-games better manage different types of players: completely free players, those who pay a little, and those who pay a lot. In regular blockchain games, such segmentation doesn’t exist. Here, everyone can find their level of participation.

Now, about tokens. Everyone thinks projects will launch coins and everything will crash. Zung Yue says it’s inevitable, but it’s an art. Many games are not yet on exchanges because they’re negotiating or simply don’t know how to do it. Slipy used to oppose token issuance, but then he realized: if you launch a token at the right moment, it can give the project a second wind.

More and more developers and venture funds are looking at Telegram mini-games as a real market. Yes, there are many challenges ahead. Yes, there’s a risk of collapse after token launch. But the numbers don’t lie: it works, it makes money, and it’s growing. Maybe we’ve already seen that big game that will become a hit, but not everyone has realized it yet.