Tango is on a roll. After raising more than $280 million through Alibaba as part of a Series D round of financing, the company wants to improve its messaging app with the addition of game promotion. It recently announced a $25 million fund that will help support the program, meant to draw in and possibly even invest in developers of said games.

Tango has been in the games business since last year, after it announced the creation of its own games and opening up its messaging platform to interested third-party developers, with the help of a software development kit. The move was a success for it, as games running within its app managed to rank high on app store charts in the games category.

Jim Ying, Tango’s new vice president of games publishing, explained how the success worked well for the company. With the introduction of social medium in games, user engagement has grown nearly two to three times in size. More than 40 partners have signed on, with two to four games releasing on a weekly basis. With the new fun, more games will continue to be added, around the same pace, but with direct publishing.

With 200 million users ready to take part in gaming, and a focus on devoted games (not necessarily quick play stuff like Flappy Bird), this could be a big new initiative for the company.

This move by Tango is intended to make its messaging app an important tool for game discovery. That’s certainly the case in Asia, where messaging apps like WeChat, Line and Kakao have become major game player acquisition tools for game publishers. Publishers have even created special versions of games for messaging, such as the version of Candy Crush Saga King created for Kakao in South Korea.

While messaging apps have been popular around the world (WhatsApp and Tango are popular in North America and Europe), games have not been particularly important outside of Asia. Perhap’s Tango’s new initiative can change that.

Do you think this will be a successful move for Tango

Source: TechCrunch