It’s been a long wait, but Outfit7 has revealed My Talking Tom Friends 2, a new mobile game that will bring the Talking Tom & Friends crew back in a new mobile game.

Outfit7 is launching the single-player game this July as a sequel to My Talking Tom Friends, which debuted in 2020. Both games are related to My Talking Tom, the original hit title that introduced Tom the talking cat to the world in 2012. The game will be coming in July, and it already has a million people who have pre-registered.

This game gathers Tom’s friends in a neighborhood group. Players can jump into a totally reimagined world and hang out with Talking Tom, Angela, Hank, Becca and Ben. This highly anticipated sequel ramps up the friendship vibes with personalized houses for each character, fresh new ways for them to express themselves, and a ton of mini-games and hangouts to explore, said Ante Odic, senior vice president of product development, in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.

“The original was a really a hit game and one of our flagship apps,” Odic said. “It was a new concept because it was a different game from what we had been doing until then. It is a concept we really believed in and the reaction from the audience and market was really, really good.”

Plus, the characters are fully voiced – speaking, joking, and expressing themselves with real voices that bring even more personality and charm to every interaction. And to top it off, early birds who join the fun within the first 14 days will unlock a special gift: Tom’s slick new Rizzler Outfit — as a way to kick things off in style.

Welcome to the Neighborhood

At the heart of My Talking Tom Friends 2 lies a lively new neighborhood where every character’s home reflects their unique personality – from Tom’s rockstar loft to Angela’s artsy studio, and from Hank’s cozy critter hideout to Becca’s tech hub and Ben’s inventor’s garage.

Players can explore the neighborhood and visit local spots like the food store, boutique, health clinic, and greenhouse – each bursting with fun and creative activities. A dynamic day-night cycle adds fresh moods and magical moments to discover, making the neighborhood feel truly alive.

Mini-Games, Max Fun

Whether players are in the mood for action, creativity, or just something quirky, My Talking Tom Friends 2 delivers with a big bunch of fresh mini-games. You can engage in street-style spray painting and paper plane flights, or play football shootouts, kite crafting, high-speed races, and even mowing mayhem. It’s all seamlessly woven into the game world.

Talking characters with a sense of humor

For the first time in the series, the characters speak with real voices, adding a whole new dimension to how they express themselves. Players can hear Tom, Angela, Hank, Ben, and Becca crack jokes, react to moments, and bring even more personality to the screen. This feature adds a fresh layer of charm and humor, making the world feel more alive and every interaction more personal.

Bus trips to new worlds

Beyond the neighborhood, players can catch a ride on the new bus system to the Water Park – a splashy, slide-packed destination full of surprises. And that’s just the beginning – more bus trips and new worlds are already on the way.

Taking friendships to new heights

My Talking Tom Friends 2 builds on fan favorites like bigger worlds, deeper bonds, and many more ways to connect. The characters are bursting with personality and charm, feeling more relatable than ever. This sequel serves up an even richer, more heartfelt experience, mixing fun gameplay with genuine moments. It’s the next step in the Talking Tom & Friends journey, made to delight players of all ages.

To celebrate the global launch, players who join the game within the first 14 days will receive an exclusive gift: the stylish Rizzler outfit for Tom. It’s the perfect way to start your adventure in style.

During its long journey, the company learned how to do live ops and updates and learned how users interact with those kinds of games and new technologies, he said.

“With our passion for these great characters and brand, we are putting energy into this sequel,” he said. “So we are very excited to see how it’s going to go. It’s a lot of new type of content.”

Odic said the new game has more diversity of content than the game from 2020, and there are some functions that the game can pull off better now. The setting will be outside, as the characters will be living in a neighborhood rather than just a single house.

“We will have individual houses for each of them. They will be individual places where they will be able to express their uniqueness, characteristics, hobbies, interests, and they’re basically different personalities that they have as characters,” Odic said.

In those houses, users will be able to interact with them. All the characters can join in a house and do stuff together. And there will be new mini games that connect with the world in a more intuitive way, more seamless, he said.

“It’s going to be new kinds of mini games and experiences for users. Then the characters will be talking for the first time, not just repeating. They’re going to have their own voices, and they will be able to react and comment and have fun with each other and also with the user and us,” Odic said. “It was always super important that the characters are not just some kind of entity in the game representing what the users are doing. They are actual characters with needs that are interacting with the environment and with the user itself. And now basically we are adding a whole new communication channel that can put that on a whole new level, where they can react to things around them. They can react to each other in a funny way, and they can also react in one more additional way with the user.”

That enhances the connection that players will have with the characters and bring them to life.

A new direction for the sequel

In the first game, players could take characters to a set of stores where you just can buy items for these characters. But now they will be taking characters to the whole new additional parts of the world where there will be new stuff to explore, and they can interact with characters.

“We are really broadening the kind of memorable experiences that we want to give to our users to explore together with these characters,” Odic said.

A cautious approach on AI

While the characters are deeper and more fun, they’re not yet going to have generative AI built into them.

“They are going to be more lifelike and be fun, but we are exploring using AI for this purpose. We did some tests in the past, and we found that it’s still kind of clunky,” Odic said.

Given the risks of characters going sideways, the company decided to skip full AI for the characters, he said. That’s not so great for a kids’ game, as conversations with children should not be open ended with AI characters. Rather, they should be focused and controlled for appropriate dialogue.

“We keep them in character and control how it all works together,” he said.

A game development journey

The game will be mobile on the iOS App Store and the Google Play store. Odic said the game took about 18 months to two years to make. A small team worked on a variety of prototypes, and then they feell in love with the idea of creating individual houses for each character. After that, the team went into full production. At various teams, there were 20, 30 or even 50 people working on the game.

During the development, the company started reworking details of the brand and the different characters. What are their details and characteristics?

“My Talking Tom Friends 2 is the first product that, on this scale, is going to show and represent all of these new things and this rework,” Odic said. “We are building a more cohesive strategy of all of these products together, how they’re going together, how they’re working together, how they are supporting each other.”

At Outfit7, there are a total of 400 people working at the company. Many are part of the live operations teams working on existing games, mainly six of the biggest hits to date. There are a couple of other teams working on other unannounced titles that are coming, Odic said. Some will continue to work on My Talking Tom Friends 2 as new updates get started.

Of the gameplay, Odic, said, “We are immersing you in this world with these characters for you to just explore this high quality content in a casual way. It is light hearted. It is just fun, something to relax with.”

The changing industry

Odic acknowledged that the whole game industry is much more complex. There is a lot of complexity with the addition of publishing partners, distribution partners — not just development studios. There are advertising partners, external development companies and more. It’s also a saturated market with more mature competition.

“It’s a much harder market and industry for now to reach the same level of success as before, but it is not the first time this has happened in gaming, and also it happens from time to time in different industries,” Odic said.

He acknowledged some bad can come out of it, like studio closings and layoffs. But there is also some good that can come, with a resetting of costs and new opportunities for smaller companies. Odic doesn’t think this is a time to retreat, or to “exploit” an old franchise rather than “explore” a new one.

“What can happen in these harder times is that people kind of close up and squeeze and they go more into exploitation than into exploration, because exploration is short term riskier. But for the long term, it is better to do exploration. My concern is that if everybody goes into exploitation and put less efforts into exploring, then new ideas, new games, new individuals, new developers, new innovative ideas, are going to have a harder time to reach audiences,” Odic said.

During this time, companies can reevaluate what players really want from the games of the future, Odic said. In that way, the tough times can help the industry wake up, help it find “happy accidents,” and return to growth.

“It is a difficult situation, sure. But it is on all of us to do our best so that those good things happen. We have a lot of things that are happening. We have more things that we have identified as business opportunities, and we have resources to do all of that. So for us, we are actually in a good situation. We can see these trends from the industry, of course, as well, but we are actually keeping our ecosystem of users pretty stable, and we are profitable. We have still a very strong performance.”

Odic said it isn’t clear yet what the outcome of the antitrust case between Epic Games and Apple will be. Epic Games has been allowed to get Fortnite back on the app store after 4.5 years of legal maneuvers, but it isn’t clear what it means for each developer in the industry.

“To be honest, we need to keep our eyes open and see where it is going to go and in what way. We definitely need to take opportunities as they come. But it’s hard for me just to predict,” he said.

While Outfit7 has always focused on global games, Odic said there are territories of the world that are also becoming more important. He aims to have his company ready to serve content to any region of the world where the growth is happening.