Tango is releasing its first internally produced game for its own mobile messaging network. Road Riot for Tango is available today on Android. The classic arcade-style game could reach as many as 130 million Tango members across the world.
Blast other cars as you dash for the finish line in Road Riot.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Tango built itself as a mobile messaging network to replace the older SMS text messages. But it has seen the success of games on messaging platforms in Asia, such as Kakao in South Korea and Line in Japan. These companies have launched games on top of their mobile messaging networks, and these games are turning out to be some of the best moneymakers in the world. That’s because friends freely share the games with others, reducing the amount that game makers spend on advertising. And because the networks make it simple to spend money, the games tend to monetize exceedingly well.
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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.
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