When The Walt Disney Co. bought mobile game maker Tapulous Inc. in July, Disney wanted the startup’s cofounders to build upon the popular “Tap Tap Revenge” franchise of music apps for iPhones and other gadgets and set the strategy for its fledgling mobile games division.
This month, the efforts of Tapulous co-founders Bart Decrem and Andrew Lacy are giving shape to Disney’s plan for mobile and social games to reverse hundreds of millions of dollars in annual losses at its interactive unit.
Early Monday, the Disney interactive unit released the fourth version of “Tap Tap Revenge” in time for the rush of downloads expected by people who get iPhones and iPads for Christmas. Last year, Tapulous sold 800,000 games on Christmas Day and it’s aiming for a million this year.
In “Tap Tap Revenge,” which works on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad from Apple Inc., players tap the screen in time to the music to score points. Each version includes a different set of songs, and players can pay to add even more.
Disney also just released “Tron: Legacy,” a game that will test Decrem and Lacy’s first major strategy decision at Disney to promote new mobile apps within existing games. “Tron: Legacy,” based on the recent movie of the same name, literally taps into 40 million Tapulous games that have already been downloaded. Disney apps, meanwhile, have been downloaded just under 20 million times.
Tap Tap players can get points for playing Tron songs, while Tron promotes Tap Tap titles with in-game advertising.
The Tapulous founders say such cross-promotion is a way to stand out from the 200,000 other apps available on Apple Inc.’s app store.
“If you’re not in the Top 100, if you’re not featured by Apple, users don’t know about you,” Decrem said in an interview. “The only way to find out…