Talking Tom Gold Run is branching out
Talking Tom Gold Run branched out into endless runners in 2016.
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Talking Tom: Managing a franchise with 8 billion downloads

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 11 min

When Talking Tom developer Outfit7 was sold to a Chinese company in January 2017 for $1 billion, it might have easily been seen as the peak. Talking Tom debuted in 2010 as a silly iPhone app that mimicked what kids told it to do. It would fart, talking a funny voice, and sing. Who would have thought it would be downloaded billions of times?

And yet that wasn’t the peak. At the time of the acquisition by United Luck Consortium (headed by Chinese chemical firm Zhejiang Jinke Entertainment Culture), Talking Tom had been downloaded 5.6 billion times. The cofounder of the Cyprus company, Samo Login, and former CEO Jure Prek stepped down. And Žiga Vavpotič became chairman and Xinyu Qian was named CEO.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.