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The partnership of Tamagotchi and Amazon Web Services is so interesting, and we love hearing more about it. Yuri Okamoto of the Bandai planning team of the Toy Division Global Toy Planning Department, who was in charge of the planning and development of the Tamagotchi Uni at Bandai, and Daisuke Sakammoto of the technical design team of the same department explain further why exactly Bandai adopted AWS for the new Tamagotchi Uni.

Mr. Okamoto explains that the first connectivity method was introduced in 1997 with the Tamagotchi Osutchi and Mesutchi. The purpose of this connectivity was for one character to be able to cross over into the other device.

Then in March of 2004, after the explosive boom of Tamagotchi calmed down, the Tamagotchi Plus model was introduced with new infrared communication. The infrared technology functionality was the exact function that was tailored in the heyday of feature phones in Japan, and it was possible not only to connect two Tamagotchi’s together, but also to mobile phones.

Newer models also introduced different types of connectivity, including NFC with the Tamagotchi 4U in 2014. NFC was aimed to allow Tamagotchi’s to connect together by touching the devices together. However, the communication speed of NFC was not very fast, so it did not become a user experience the communication would end when touched.

Tamagotchi M!X back in 2016 brought back the infrared connectivity. The Tamagotchi Meets back in 2018 then introduced Bluetooth connectivity on top of the infrared functionality which enable the ability to connect to a smartphone or tablet to use the application.

The Tamagotchi Smart which was released in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic where contact with people was suppressed. The Tamagotchi Smart allowed caretakers to interact with their Tamagotchi with the use of voice and touch, along with wearing your Tamagotchi Smart right on your wrist.

Mr. Okamoto then discusses how the Tamagotchi demand has been higher overseas than in Japan. The Tamagotchi Uni was sought out to unify the design and content of play sot hat Tamagotchi users around the world can enjoy the same Tamagotchi Uni globally.

The Tamagotchi Uni also introduced Wi-Fi for the first time. This enables the new Tamaverse feature, software updates, and more. There are a wide range of functions that should be independently implemented in the cloud infrastructure to realize the concept of the Tamagotchi Uni. AWS has great infrastructure capabilities and a range of sample documents to advance development.

The Tamagotchi Uni is the first Tamagotchi to ever connect to Wi-Fi, which enables it to receive over the area updates, programing changes, and more. How exactly is this all being done by Bandai Japan? Well Bandai has built the Tamagotchi Uni on the Amazon Web Services platform (AWS).

The details of this are actually outlined on a recent article on the Amazon Web Services blog. The blog post provided a detailed view on how Tamagotchi Uni use AWS to achieve secure and reliable connectivity and quickly deliver new content updates without leaving customers waiting.It details that Bandai Co., Ltd., the company responsible for product development and sales, adopted AWS IoT to realize the concept of globally interconnected Tamagotchi, enabling users to interact with each other.

Bandai partnered with their cloud development partner, Phoenisys, Inc., to connect and manage million of Tamagotchi devices. One of the critical features was the over the air software updates which uses the jobs feature of AWS IoT Device Management to distribute the latest firmware across all Tamagotchi devices without causing any delays to customers.

To make Tamagotchi Uni IoT-enabled, Bandai establish the three key goals, which was implementing secure connections, scaling the load-balancing resources to accommodate over 1 million connections worldwide, and optimizing operational costs. The article even features the AWS architecture for the Tamagotchi Uni, which is interesting.

AWS IoT Core is used to manage the state of each Tamagotchi Uni device, which helps retrieve distributed items and content. AWS IoT Device Management is used to index the extensive Tamagotchi Uni fleet and create dynamic groups on the state of each device, facilitating efficient over-the-air (OTA) updates. FreeRTOS is used to minimize the amount of resources and code required to implement device-to-cloud communication for efficient system development. AWS Lambda is used to process tasks, delivering new announcements, and registering assets. Amazon DynamoDB is used as a fully managed, sever less, key-value noSQL database that runs high-performance applications at any scale. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is used for object storage service, each of these data stores are used to manage the various resources within Tamagotchi Uni. Lastly, Amazon Timestream is used to accumulate historical data of user’s actions like downloading items and additional content.

The article also details how Bandai is handling large scale firmware updates to Tamagotchi Uni devices which are executed at a rate of 1,000 units per hour which would have resulted in a delay for some devices. The team actually designed job delivery as a continuous job which automatically updates the devices under certain conditions. This is using fleet indexing that runs a query to see which devices meet the criteria for the update to be pushed out to it.

Lastly the article details how Bandai conducted system performance testing at a large-scale to emulate what it would be like after the device was released. They verified the smooth operation and performance of updates through their testing.

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