

Apple wages war on incentivized app downloads - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/11/apple-stomps-on-tapjoys-app-download-circle-jerk-again/

======
ChuckMcM
I am not sure why I find these sorts of stories fascinating. Maybe its some
sort of schadenfreude, the World of Warcraft gold selling underground had lots
of amazing back and forth between folks making money off selling 'fake' gold
and Blizzard trying to shut them down. I always wondered why that was since
Blizzard was just as much a money driven enterprise as the gold farmers.

~~~
ChiperSoft
Blizzard has three vested interests in shutting down gold sellers.

The first is that the majority of sold gold is stolen from compromised
accounts. The customer service costs of resolving those accounts have a real
world price.

The second is that it devalues the in-game economy. This frustrates players
and leads to the loss of subscriptions.

Finally, Blizzard has to at least make a show of not wanting any kind of
currency exchange. That leads to issues of taxation and financial auditing.
Blizzard has no desire to be Lindon Labs.

There's more to it than this, of course, but I'm on my phone and don't feel
like tapping any more.

~~~
Karunamon
>The first is that the majority of sold gold is stolen from compromised
accounts.

This doesn't seem true at first glance, given the number of stories of massive
gold farming operations (by grinding, not by crime) floating around. Is there
anything to support that?

~~~
sjm
I think that was true in the past. These days, as far as I'm aware gold
sellers actually spend more effort on spreading keyloggers in an attempt to
steal accounts. This was particularly evident on Blizzard's WoW forums a while
back where every second post included a dodgy-looking link to a keylogger
(usually including some broken English about sex or women — infamously one
keylogger post promised "sex leg").

------
stanleydrew
> I can’t wait to see what Tapjoy does next in this ever-escalating arms race.
> One thing’s for sure – it’ll be very profitable. And very shady.

This kind of cheerleading seems very distasteful. I hope that Tapjoy doesn't
do anything next. I hope they just go away. Why would you hope for an
unethical company that doesn't care at all about building an honest product to
come up with a new way to get around restrictions preventing its dishonest
practices?

~~~
ihuman
I thought that was sarcasm. No one actually hopes a company will go and do
unethical things.

------
beedogs
"Circle Jerk"? Really, Techcrunch? Do we need to force this stupid term even
further into the lexicon of the Internet?

------
olgeni
The fun thing about all these Apple stories is that Apple either "wages war",
"stomps", "goes nookular" over something, or it "quietly" acts to cover
something up. It's more or less always the same four words.

------
JenniferAlderid
Can anyone explain what FreeMyApps (<http://freemyapps.com/>) is doing
differently to avoid getting shut down?

