Tango’s Road Riot mobile game has been downloaded more than 10 million times in the past year. The mobile-messaging network’s racing title also has a million daily active players, and it is the No. 1 racing game in the Google Play app store.
Jim Ying of Tango.
That’s a big achievement for one of Tango’s internally produced mobile games, but it’s also important because the accomplishment validates the company’s new publishing model, said Jim Ying, vice president of games publishing for the Mountain View, Calif.-based firm. Tango has a mobile-messaging network with more than 250 million users, and it wants to use that network to make games more viral. The company hopes that games will help it retain people for a longer period of time and monetize its network, which is like a more modern version of text messaging.
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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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