Some time ago Novosibirsk Alawar published Montezuma Blitz for Tango. In this regard, we decided to ask Yulia Nabieva, the head of the mobile sales and marketing department of the company, about Tango in general and the experience of working with it in particular.
Hi! We all know that Tango is an American messenger, but there are not very many details about it, to be honest. Tell us a little about the messenger (who does it, how long ago, how many downloads and which MAU, how long has the gaming platform been working within it).
Yulia Nabieva
Hi! Look, according to official information from Tango, she started her work in 2009. The central office of the company is located in Silicon Valley in California. At the moment, the base of active users is more than 200 million, and the MAU of the application is more than 70 million. The messenger is available on iOS, Android, WindowsPhone 7 and PC. The app is available in 14 languages in 224 countries.
The total amount of investments that have been invested in the company since its inception by a variety of investors is $367 million, of which $280 million was invested by Alibaba Group (a large Chinese company engaged in e–commerce, a public company, and which is 43% owned by Yahoo!) in March of this year.
It is also worth noting separately that since April of this year, the Tango team has hired a new specialist, the vice president of the game publishing house Jim Ying, who previously held a similar position in GREE. This proves once again that Tango is making a serious bet on the development of the gaming direction, although it was originally launched as a messenger with the function of video calls.
I know the question is not for you, but, suddenly, you know: now the messenger market is very rich in offers. And each of them has, conditionally, a regional specialization. Kakao – Korea, New ICQ – Brazil, Line – Japan, WeChat – China and so on. Where is the main market of Tango and what success has it achieved in it?
Tango themselves emphasize that a third of their users are in North America – 31% (of which 27% are in the USA). The remaining 70% are evenly distributed around the world: 20% Asia, 12% Europe, 29% Central Asia, 8% for the rest of the world.
In general, it is worth noting that now in the messenger industry, the division by regions in which they exist can be considered very conditional. Each of the companies developing messengers is trying to diversify, reduce risks, and increase its presence in other regions. Therefore, it is not entirely correct to talk about any one key region in this niche. For example, the LINE messenger, in addition to Japan, has gained great popularity in the ASEAN countries: Thailand, Indonesia, is actively growing in Taiwan, taking the first places of the tops, etc.
Analyzing the statistics of our Montezuma Blitz, we see, firstly, that we have a large percentage of players from Russia, although this is rather due to the popularity of the Alawar brand in the local market. Secondly, we have a huge number of players from Arab countries, they follow the players from the USA. As can be seen from the figures given by Tango itself, the messenger is popular in the countries of Central Asia, and in this region no other messenger can compete with Tango. A pleasant discovery for us was that the Arabs turned out to be great gamers and are ready to spend a lot of time and money on games inside the messenger.
How many games are currently on the Tango gaming platform?
As far as we know, the first contracts with developers began to be signed in 2012, the games appeared in the application in March 2013. We started with 7 games. Now there are more than 35 games in the Tango catalog (most of them can be found in the Games section). A distinctive feature of the games is the ease and accessibility of the genre, so they cover the maximum audience of the application.
What kind of push does Tango give in terms of downloads?
After the launch of the games catalog, the increase in the user base was, according to our estimates, approximately comparable to the increase in the audience that we received after the launch of the LINE version of our ShakeSpears game!
The audience of “Tango” is not spoiled by content, and the games get a very good push when launched. Further, the volume of the audience remains approximately stable, there is not such an active increase, since the “audience capacity” of the messenger is finite, the dynamics of the growth of new users is still small, but the messenger team has quite aggressive plans to attract new users. Tango is one of the few partners who are not only aware of the specifics of their audience, but are also ready to look for new opportunities, flexible tools to increase the audience and develop the messenger and games integrated into it. The situation with messengers that came to the market from Asia is different: these companies are not very open and have rather strict procedures for interacting with developers, and, as a rule, do not go into an open dialogue with the developer.
How high-quality is this traffic, how well is it monetized?
The messenger audience differs from the store audience and does not overlap with it. Messenger players come to the game purposefully and pay more actively inside the game. Tango users love light games, casual with a lot of content with f2p monetization. The audience is really of higher quality, and it shows higher indicators than, for example, our classic audience from mobile stores in the USA.
As I said above, our MontezumaBlitz gets a large audience from Arab countries. There are few paying players among these players, but the whales pay more than in other regions.
As far as I know, you have now released Blitz within the framework of the platform. Can you share the exact numbers or at least the orders of how much his Tango version brings (or at least what part of the income from the title brings the version for this messenger)?
If we compare the Montezuma Blitz version for stores (App Store and GooglePlay) and the version for Tango, then this messenger accounts for 30-40% of total revenue from month to month (of course, specific, local markets are not taken into account here, these are only official stores). By the way, MontezumaBlitz, will be distributed in China in partnership with Chukong. But our plans include increasing the share of the Tango version to 60%. As you may have noticed, Tango features MontezumaBlitz in its catalog, and we also receive active PR support from them. The messenger team is openly discussing new promotion opportunities and already now we have a plan that, according to our calculations, will increase the share of the Tango game by one and a half times.
On what terms do you cooperate with Tango?
Income sharing conditions are standard: 70% to the developer, 30% to Tango.Tango provides PR and promo support for the game, as well as tech.support. This is a standard contract.
They do not require an exclusive to the countries, we can safely distribute the original version of the game without integration with the Tango platform. They do not require exclusivity, as there is no competition for the audience. There is competition within the store, but the audience that is in the messenger is very different from the usual audience, and we will not find it so easily in the store. So Facebook-integrated audience gets Facebook audience, and this version gets Tango audience.
I would compare messengers with stores in this matter. As stores do not impose restrictions on us, for example, on exclusive distribution, so do messengers. It turns out that messengers are a store within a store that provides its users to the developer, and the developer shares income with him for this.
Are you planning to bring other projects to this platform?
Yes, we have a contract for another project. This will be a completely new game in the Tower Defense genre, which is expected to be released before the end of the year. Tango is waiting for this release, as this will be their first experience of bringing a project of the Tower Defense genre into the messenger.
And the last question: there are few high-quality good projects on Tango right now, nevertheless, as far as can be judged by the company’s recent initiatives (like the opening of a $25 million fund, by the way, do you know how and to whom and what money will go from it?), it is very interested in good projects. Actually, hence the question: what does it take to get into the line of projects released for the Tango platform?
It’s not difficult to get there, the main thing is that the product is really high-quality. Tango has quite tough testing, and, importantly, they work deeply with feedback from users after the release.
We see that over the past year, Tango has greatly increased and improved its production team, which is actively working with games that are sharpened to make games profitable.
If your project is really high-quality, and you are ready to work on adapting the game to the Tango platform, release updates and support and develop a special version of the game, then you will not only receive the support of a partner at the start, but also a constant increase in income. I think that the fund will be spent on supporting the messenger’s gaming direction, although it does not make any statements on this topic. In any case, we will soon learn about the official development plans of the messenger, and for our part we have no doubt that Tango will not only strengthen its position in the market, but will also actively grow and develop.
Thanks for the interview!