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Value of quarterly activity in The Simpsons: Tapped Out estimated at $58 million

Game on the up with 5.4 million DAUs

Value of quarterly activity in The Simpsons: Tapped Out estimated at $58 million
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| The Simpsons: Tapped Out

One interesting news snippet from the ChinaJoy 2013 conference came courtesy of EA's SVP, mobile publishing, Bernard Kim.

Revealing that The Simpsons: Tapped Out now has 5.4 million daily active players, Kim point out that was 'more than EA Mobile had across all its games in 2012'.

Indeed, as EA's Q1 financial filings reveal, the game generated more cash between April to June 2013 than at any time since it launched (technically relaunched) in October 2012.

"In the past quarter, it's generated 6 billion gameplay minutes, 1 billion quests, and players have spent more than 233 billion bucks," Kim added.

Sketchy calculations

Bucks are the in-game soft currency, which players earn.

Alternatively, they can buy the hard currency - called donuts - and convert them. This give us the opportunity to perform some real rough back-of-ticket math.

You can buy 100,000 bucks for 600 donuts, while 2,400 donuts cost $99.99. Hence, if we assume all those bucks were purchased (a very big assumption), this would be worth about $58 million.

($100 will buy you 400,000 bucks.)

Obviously, we can't say that the game is generating this amount of cash, merely that players' activity (if purchased) would be 'worth' $58 million.

Interestingly, this value fits within the known revenue range, given that EA has said The Simpsons: Tapped Out generated $23 million during its first quarter (back in 2012), and now it's making more money than ever.

Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.