The Monskey game cards interacts with your phone
The Monskey game cards interacts with your phone using NFC

Together, SMARTRAC and Twinsprite (respectively Digitoyx) aim at connecting NFC enabled things such as children’s toys or playing cards to mobilephone-based games resulting in an enhanced gaming experience for users and additional revenue for developers. The topic has gained significance as the number of NFC supporting smartphones is growing extremely fast – a fact that is widely expected to boost the interest in NFC enabled games. Twinsprite is providing an NFC ready software platform, which provides cost-effective, turn-key B2B solutions, and is compatible with the leading game development engines such as “Unity”.

Twinsprite’s cloud platform manages the identity and attributes of physical objects so that they can be used as active elements inside a game. Examples of these objects could be toys, action figures or trading cards equipped with NFC tags. The platform also enables game developers to easily define the model representing the object’s data and control devices as well as the games where they can be used. That makes it easy for the games and toys industry to create new revenue streams and raise brand awareness and retention with premium features.

Taking into account that games already generate the vast majority of all revenue in all app stores, it is safe to say that there is a huge market for NFC based games. The detailed information about toy usage that is stored on the Twinsprite cloud platform enables the game developer to continually enhance the gaming experience. As an add-on feature NFC tags facilitate brand protection and further enhance product authentification.

SMARTRAC is supplying the NFC tags for customers using the Twinsprite platform, ensuring that tags are fully compliant for best gaming experience “We are proud to be able to contribute with robust scalability and offer industry leading NFC expertise in order to ensure that our technologies and services fit seamlessly into the Twinsprite platform. It’s the perfect time for our partnership, as NFC enhanced games will be influencing the whole mobile gaming market” explains Mikko Nikkanen, Senior Director Business Development at SMARTRAC.

“Together with SMARTRAC we can provide an NFC pre-paired out of the box solution and offer a safe and easy entry for game developers willing to create the ultimate gaming experience joining digital and physical worlds. With this cooperation, we are paving the way for a revolution in mobile gaming”, explains Lucia Garate, co-founder of Twinsprite.

Game developers will soon have the chance see firsthand, what the cooperation between SMARTRAC and Twinsprite means: NFC developer kits comprising software and NFC tagged toy reference are expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2014.

Forward Vision Marketing | We Market Technology