It’s been a long time coming, but it’s almost here: Tapulous is putting the finishing touches on Tap Tap Revenge 3, the next installment of its wildly sucessful iPhone music game. The game, which is best described as a “Guitar Hero for the iPhone”, will feature in-game song purchases, which were finally enabled with the release of the iPhone 3.0 software update in June. If there’s a game ripe to make a killing with these in-game downloads, it’s TTR. Tapulous expects to have the game submitted by the end of August, with general release soon thereafter depending on the App Store’s approval process.
So why does this matter? Tap Tap Revenge and its various spinoffs has been some of the iPhone’s most popular games since the App Store launched last year (in fact, a very similar game was very popular on jailbroken phones before the official store even launched). Gameplay consists of tapping your fingers to a song as colorful bubbles fall down the screen, and newer versions also make use of the phone’s accelerometer so you can shake it to the beat. As with games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, TTR tends to appeal to a very broad audience.
But until now it’s been handicapped by one major obstacle: there was no way for users to pay to download new songs. On console games like Rock Band, in-game purchases have proven very lucrative with gamers regularly plopping down around $2 per song. But the iPhone didn’t allow for this kind of transaction until recently, so Tapulous was forced to sell satellite games like TTR Weezer and TTR Coldplay, which did well but never saw nearly the usage of the main TTR app. Now they’ll be able to license songs from directly inside the flagship app, which means the number of paid downloads will likely skyrocket. It will also likely be easier to get premium artists on the platform, as they will be able to sell a song or two at a time rather than entire albums.
As a teaser, Tapulous has sent us the following frustratingly small screenshot:
