Are you looking for a new way to wish a friend a “Happy Birthday”? Maybe you want a different way to say “You are my Valentine” to a special someone or perhaps even a new way to send your mother an “I love you” on Mother’s Day. Then you will be interested in a new service from Tingly Games. This new concept in online and mobile greeting cards incorporates today’s global passion for casual games. The service is called Greeting Games, and allows people to send a casual game to friends or family members with an integrated personal message tailored to any special occasion.
People everywhere, 700 million of them, including children, parents, and grand-parents, are playing casual games on tablets, phones, and desktops. The number of people playing games continues to increase, especially with today’s easy access to games that results from the growth in mobile device ownership.
E-greetings is a business that also continues to grow as people increasingly communicate with each other digitally rather than on paper. Greeting Games is tapping into that market by introducing game play into e-greetings.
Ard Bonewald, CEO of Tingly Games says, “By combining games with greeting cards, another, more established form of communication, we are enabling senders and receivers to have even more fun with their greetings and conversations with each other.”
Greeting Games customers can personalize their greeting by including their Facebook avatar, setting the level of difficulty of the game, providing in-game messages, creating a personal message within the game, and customizing the email message. There is a reasonable variety of games, including Mahjong, Sudoku, match-three games, slicers, bubble shooters and jigsaw puzzles. Game options will expand as Tingly Games works with developers to incorporate additional game types. Additional personalization options will become available in the coming months, including different visual styles reflecting the sender’s preferences.
Tingly Games CTO Mark Overmars built the Greeting Games service in HTML5, ensuring that it is seamless across all devices, from high end tablets to the most economical smartphones. Through the end of January, the service is offered without charge to allow Tingly Games to collect user feedback. After that time, it will be offered by subscription with consumers purchasing individual cards for a nominal fee.
Sarah Turk, greeting card industry analyst for IBIS World, believes Greeting Games is an ingenious new idea for online greeting cards. She notes that the greeting card industry is moving toward premium cards such as these as the disposable income of their customers has been increasing. She also reveals that as card stores close and internet connections rise, revenue for the online greeting card industry is also expected to rise over the next five years.
Tingly Games was founded in 2012 by games veterans Ard Bonewald and Mark Overmars. Over the coming year, their Greeting Games service will be rolled out worldwide with localized versions in all major languages. More details are available at www.tinglygames.com.
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