According to Sensor Tower’s figures of 2023, about 34% of global players had downloaded Sprunki for free as a part of official promotion efforts. To name an example, the Google Play Store’s “Free for Limited Time” scheme during December of 2022 was for 48 hours, allowing gamers to download the game with no cost involved (previously at $4.99). The new daily users were 1.2 million. Technically speaking, users can sidestep the Google Play billing system using APK splitting apps (e.g., APK Editor Pro). Nevertheless, its success rate of being compatible is merely 68% and causes the game crash rate to increase by 27% (measured data for Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra). For example, during 2023, the fraud Sprunki APK file (version v2.7.3) shared by a user on a specific Indonesian forum had a probability as high as 93% to be detected by Google Play Protect for tampering with the signature certificate, and the device infection risk with malware increased by 4.7 times.
In terms of third-party platform risks, 29% of the Sprunki installation packages installed from non-official sources were found to have advertising plugins (like HiddenAds), which triggered 1.2 full-screen advertisements every second, driving the device’s peak CPU load rate up to 89% (32% when running a normal game). An experiment that was launched by Carnegie Mellon University in 2021 indicated that the cracked version of Sprunki accessed through the Tor network took an average of 47 minutes (officially just 1.5 minutes) and that the match rate between the file hash value (SHA-256) of the cracked version and the original version was less than 12%. More seriously, however, is that such files have a tendency to be injected into keyloggers, which pilfer 23 input events per second. In a 2022 telecommunications fraud case, decrypted by the police in Brazil, hackers illegitimately accessed the payment information of 85,000 customers via a hacked version of Sprunki, and the money involved amounted to 1.8 million US dollars.
Of the legal choices, the “Free AD Support Version” brought about by Sprunki developers allows users to pay for full content by watching up to 15 ads (30 seconds long) per day. Its monetization strategy aids developers in earning an average monthly advertising income of $0.7 per user (data source: IronSource 2023 report). Apart from this, some educational institutions (such as the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil) have collaborated with Sprunki to offer an academic license version. Students can activate the license for free by using their.edu email address. In 2023, this initiative reached 270,000 users worldwide, increasing the average gaming time per day from 1.2 hours to 2.7 hours.
Tech geeks may reverse-engineer to get the Unity resource package (.assets file) of Sprunki, but they have to crack the IL2CPP encryption (AES-256 key strength), and the theoretical time of a single brute-force cracking attempt is 17,000 years (estimated by the MIT Media Lab in 2023). If a cloud service platform (such as the AWS EC2 g4dn instance cluster) is used, the hourly rate is 0.52, and the total cost of uninterrupted use for 30 days totals 374. The economic effectiveness is much less than purchasing the genuine version directly. Legally, under Section 1201 of the US DMCA, circumventing game DRM protection can be punished with up to five years in prison and a fine of 500,000. In 2022, a Californian court sentenced a cracking group to 2.2 million damages, including distributing 13,000 copies of Sprunki illegally.
Despite the risk, some players can shift to a low-cost region (such as the Turkey region, where Sprunki is priced at $0.99) through a VPN to purchase it but they have to suffer the risk of account ban (ban rate is 23% once the Steam platform monitors such behavior). According to 2023 figures of the Reddit community, Sprunki free trial success with the home sharing feature is 89%, but a single account can have up to 5 devices available for sharing, and the game time of the primary purchaser must be over 2 hours in order for it to work. The creators suggest that users mainly take part in official activities (e.g., Twitch Drop). In the period of cooperation in 2022, 380,000 free CDKeys were given out, and the rate of redemption and activation reached as much as 98%.