Thailand dethrones Taiwan on Popcat medal table

泰國將台灣擠下 Popcat 排行榜

Thais blame bad government, pandemic for Popcat victory


TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Thai netizens on Sunday (Aug. 15) celebrated dethroning Taiwan from the coveted gold medal level in the online game Popcat.

Popcat is a clicker game based on Twitter in which users click with their mouse or tap on their phone for points. In the highly simplistic game, payers gain points by clicking on a cat named Oatmeal's face to cause him to open his mouth and make a popping sound.

The points are allocated to the country where a given player is located, thereby building up points for that nation's "team" in the game's medal table. Last week, while still feeling the effects of Olympics fever, so many Taiwanese netizens poured on clicks that Team Taiwan surpassed Finland for the gold medal by Aug. 13.

Tiny Taiwan's success emboldened "athletes" in Southeast Asian countries to take a shot at pushing their country to the top. Over the weekend, players from Malaysia and Thailand entered into a mad clicking frenzy, with the former registering 87,000 clicks per second and the latter logging 500,000 per second, while Taiwan lagged behind with a pedestrian 74,000 clicks per second.

By Sunday, Malaysia had taken the bronze position with 13 billion clicks, Taiwan had dropped to silver with 18 billion clicks, and Thailand had surged to the gold with 30 billion clicks. By noon that day, Thailand had kicked into overdrive with 1.1 million clicks per second.

Thai netizens were self-deprecatingly apologetic to fellow Milk Tea Alliance members Taiwan and Malaysia, chalking up their victory to political problems and the pandemic:

"Sorry if Malaysia and Taiwan would think that Thai people hack. But in fact, most Thai people are unemployed. because we have a bad government," wrote one Thai user. Another noted that Taiwan has an "amazing government" and that Malaysia's PM had resigned but that Thailand is stuck with its leadership, so "let us have small happiness for this victory."

Currently, Thailand is still in the top spot with a commanding lead of 40 billion clicks to Taiwan's 27 billion. Malaysia is still in bronze medal position with 14 billion.