Delphi Digital I agree with you broadly speaking. Hamster Kombat is definitely massively botted, but it's impossible to know to what degree from the outside. For now we're left with public data as Telegram/TON doesn't track a lot and won't disclose more granular information. However, as to their success, there has been talks of them making a lot of money (high 8 digits) by selling their users like an ad network, but nothing substantiated. Binance actively chose not to disclose any revenue metrics in their report in contrast to what they released on Catizen. Which again leaves us a bit in the dark.
Hamster Kombat has about 55M unique TON wallets connected to the game, but that can in turn easily be botted as well, especially when incentives are at play. People can buy an anonymous phone number rather easily and TON doesn't granularly track personal info which makes their users pretty low value when compared to something like WeChat, so while it would help a bit by increasing the effort on the user-side, even associating accounts to something like a sim doesn't do the trick. I dove into that in our larger TON report, it is very important to differentiate between user quality when looking at an ecosystem like TON.
I don't see an ecosystem like Hamster Kombat as a sustainable one if they aren't able to pivot into a larger distribution platform that elevates itself from the simple clicker loop. And that's incredibly difficult to do. Their success in terms of agglomerating a massive amount of users through crypto incentives that can then be monetized like an ad network is undeniable I think, but I heavily agree that the numbers are inflated and that the quality of users is low.