A new breed of Tango connected iOS and Android apps are on their way, beginning today with Bubble Pang. Bubble Pang looks very similar to the classic Bust-A-Move games, where players must match up colored balls in order to survive. It’s the first game in a series of many which use the Tango messenger app as a platform to deliver an extremely social gaming experience. By leveraging the power of Tango, developer Weeby.co can make games with quick access to a user’s friends and contacts, and even allow them to play across platforms. It’s an interesting concept, and one that could pay off in spades.
We didn’t just make a game with great social flows, we built an entire social game template with dozens of configurable modules. These are super-polished UIs, like gifts, challenges, social progression maps, messaging, weekly tournaments, alliances — any feature that consistently drives users back to the game to re-engage their friends. – Weeby.co CEO Michael Carter
Here are some of the highlights of Bubble Pang for Tango from the Google Play Store:
- Fast-paced, bubble-blasting EXCITEMENT!
- ITEMS to unlock by gaining levels
- LEADERBOARDS – Beat your friends’ scores!
- Gain an ADVANTAGE and power up with special bubbles
- Receive GIFTS from friends!
- Play SMART to drop bubbles and multiply your score
- Or play FAST to pop as may as you can!
- Universal game looks great on ALL devices!
- FREE updates!
Weeby.co Messenger App Gaming Startup launches Bubble Pang, its first Tango Game
Mountain View, May 15, 2014 /PRESS RELEASE/ — Weeby.co launched Bubble Pang its first Tango connected game today on Android and iOS. This marks Weeby.co’s second integration into a messenger app platform this year and the first with a game from its own studio. Weeby.co is the first company to specifically build tech, tools and games for messenger apps.
Bubble Pang for Tango is a beautiful bubble shooter, a mobile gaming stalwart and spiritual descendant of popular old desktop games like Snood, combined with a smooth social leaderboard UI flow. It is a fun fast paced casual game for players of all ages and an elegant demonstration of how the Weeby.co technology simplifies social game development.
Players engage with their Tango friends, as they compete for top spot on the leaderboard each week, and motivate their friends by sending extra lives and gloating about their new high scores. Implementing those popular socially driven retention features took the tiny Weeby.co studio’s single game engineer exactly zero time and yielded impressive metrics.
Weeby.co CEO Michael Carter explains:
The secret to our success is the very best social re-engagement, retention, and monetization mechanics in the industry, polished and honed over two years and now productized as the Weeby.co SDK. These features depend heavily on player-to-player engagement which is Weeby.co’s focus.
We didn’t just make a game with great social flows, we built an entire social game template with dozens of configurable modules. These are super-polished UIs, like gifts, challenges, social progression maps, messaging, weekly tournaments, alliances — any feature that consistently drives users back to the game to re-engage their friends.
Bubble Pang has incredible retention; we’re seeing 60-70% of users come back after the first day, a number which is way above industry norms for some of the top grossing games.
The Weeby.co SDK provides the UI, server and messenger integration for market-leading social and free-to-play game mechanics. The launch version also includes in-app currency modules for power-up purchases and daily bonuses. Including these required nothing more than a quickly iterated design choice and an artist using powerful dev tools to customize the UI and animations.
Tango, which just raised $280M a couple months ago, is a natural partner for Weeby.co. Since Tango launched their game platform last year, fast growing Tango has demonstrated their commitment to games by providing strong support for versatile social games.
“The toughest aspects of building a game are retention and monetization, two metrics that depend heavily on player-to-player engagement which is both Tango and Weeby.co’s focus,” said Richard Rabbat, VP of Advertising and Platform for Tango. “We’re pleased to work with Weeby.co’s launch of Bubble Pang. Weeby.co represents a new generation of mobile game developers that are very innovative and embracing messaging apps as a strategy to increase visibility and engagement through the Tango platform.”
Messenger apps such as Tango, Kik, Line, Kakao and WeChat, are progressively dominating social game distribution. As advertising prices increase, with Cost-Per-Install going from $1.30 Jan’12, to $4.36 Jan’14, this growing but fragmented messenger app space only becomes more important for the $21.6B mobile game market.
Bubble Pang for Tango is the first of a dozen or more games that Weeby.co intends to launch this summer. The Weeby.co SDK makes this feasible by drastically reducing development cycles. Studios need only worry about their core game screen, just tweaking the parameters and art for everything else. As developers build a game they just need to choose which SDK Template, Leaderboard(Flappy Birds), Progression Map (Candy Crush), or Turn-Based (Words With Friends) and the messenger app to work with, Kik, Tango, Facebook etc; they can even choose or customize default art themes.