Hamster Kombat Players May Barely Get $10 After Chaotic Airdrop

cryptonews.com:

Jeffrey Gogo is a journalist with 20 years of experience in business, finance, cryptocurrency, and climate change news and analysis.

Elena is the Features Lead at Cryptonews.com. With a Master's degree in science journalism from City University, London, she is passionate about exploring complex topics in the world of technology.

Key takeaways:

Most of the people who played the viral crypto game Hamster Kombat will likely earn a maximum of just $10 each when the HMSTR token starts trading on exchanges like Binance and OKX on Thursday, Sept. 26, at 12:00 PM UTC.

It comes after the game’s airdrop – a type of free cryptocurrency giveaway in which tokens are deposited (airdropped) into user wallets – which was rocked by controversy earlier this week, with allegations of unfair distribution.

“Cheating is bad,” the developers of Hamster Kombat said in a card sent out to 2.3 million disqualified users in September. The studio heads were cleaning the house to protect the rewards of legit gamers ahead of the airdrop and token launch on The Open Network (TON).

But now, the fair play card has been returned to the sender, as both banned and eligible players accuse the Hamster Foundation, creators of Hamster Kombat, of cheating them out of their hard-earned allocations.

Only 43% of users, or 131 million people, who played the game since its March 26 launch as a mini-app on Telegram received the HMSTR airdrop. Some 2.3 million users were banned for cheating, and the majority of them did not meet the criteria. Hamster Kombat claims to have 300 million players, making it the biggest “clicker game.”

At issue is a last-minute announcement that 11.25% of the 60 billion HMSTR tokens allocated to community members for Season 1 will be locked for 10