Over the weekend Tapulous head of business development Tim O' Brien announced that the company was successfully monetizing pirated copies of its iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge 3 by selling the pirates virtual goods as in-app purchases. Tapulous estimates that Tap Tap Revenge 3 has been downloaded 2.5 million times, but that 1 million of those downloads are pirated copies.
"We’ve started running ads to the pirate users more aggressively. Some of those users, because we sell virtual goods, have become high-volume users," said O'Brien, speaking at the Midem music festival in Cannes.
O'Brien stated that Tapulous has built ways of differentiating legitimate and pirate copies of Tap Tap Revenge 3 into the software. Pirated copies can still communicate with the Tapulous network and their in-game virtual item shops still work. According to O'Brien, this has lead to some pirate users spending far more than the app's initial cost on virtual items like additional songs and avatar customization pieces.
Tapulous serves a total of about 25 million users through its hit iPhone games. The company stated that it had become profitable in June, with sources estimating its revenue at $2-3 million. Tap Tap Revenge 3 launched in the fall of 2009 as a $.99 download, with prices for in-game virtual goods ranging from $.99 to $2.99.
[via MocoNews]
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