Walmart has announced plans to partner with Unity to introduce commerce APIs to games and apps powered by the popular cross-platform game engine and editor. This will enable Walmart to link players directly to real-world storefronts in games built in Unity. Reportedly, it’s a system designed to ‘enable creators to sell physical items in RT3D experiences’, opening up new avenues for monetisation in games – specifically those built in Unity.
See It, Buy It
This news comes following a period of testing by Walmart – this isn’t an all-new concept, but the partnership with Unity is fresh. In the last year, Walmart has worked with three developers to produce the following games:
- House Flip – Users can buy real-life counterparts of furniture and furnishings that they find in the game through Walmart’s commerce APIs.
- Avakin Life – Walmart allows players to buy real-world representations of apparel features in the game.
- ZEPETO – In ZEPETO, users can purchase a series of brands (apparel, lifestyle items) from Walmart
With this new partnership, users will be able to purchase and order items from Walmart without ever needing to leave the game that they’re playing. How often have you played a game like The Sims and wanted to order a piece of furniture straight out of the catalogue?
In a statement, the VP and GM of Metaverse Commerce at Walmart, Tom Kang, said:
We have an opportunity to connect the physical and digital realms in a way that only Walmart can, meeting our customers and members with authentic experiences where they already are. By opening up Walmart’s commerce APIs to the Unity development community, we’re empowering developers to offer a new mechanism to further drive user engagement while making it easy and convenient for players to complete a transaction for physical products without leaving the game, virtual world or app.
In a press release, it was stressed that Unity boasts more than 1.1 million developers (despite recent controversies around pricing) and averages 3.6 billion game and application downloads per month, giving Walmart a sizeable and lucrative reach as it broadens its digital horizons.
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