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Walmart and Unity recently announced a real-world commerce initiative for apps and games.
After you finish hitting home runs on zombie heads in the latest Walking Dead mobile game, why not buy the baseball bat? Or, perhaps more likely, if you build the perfect house in House Flip, maybe you want to get that great sofa in real life.
At least, that’s what Unity and Walmart are hoping you’ll want to do.
Unity makes the software that powers most of the world’s mobile games, while Walmart has millions of SKUs of purchasable and shippable stuff. The companies think combining the two could unlock in-game real-world commerce. The most likely option, however, is virtual worlds and augmented reality apps that use bits to sell atoms.
“We have an opportunity to connect the physical and digital realms in a way that only Walmart can,” Walmart general manager of metaverse commerce Tom Kang said in a statement. “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.”
That statement conveniently ignores Amazon, of course, which has a much bigger e-commerce empire than Walmart along with a much more developed shipping capability.
Amazon, however, has games of its own as well as its very own mobile app store for Android devices as well as Amazon Fire tablets. Given Europe’s Digital Markets Act, that could very soon expand into an app store for iOS, at least in the EU. Those factors make Amazon a less-compelling partner for Unity, while also likely making Unity a less-necessary partner for Amazon.
Regardless, this is a big step to enabling mobile commerce in non-traditional settings.
“This announcement paves the way for new innovation in commerce for games and other virtual experiences,” Unity president Marc Whitten said in a statement. “We’re excited to be able to give Unity developers the option of another new revenue stream while keeping players within their games and experiences.”
Walmart and Unity have tested the concept in three apps:
- House Flip (a virtual home building app)
- Avakin Life (a virtual social experience akin to Second Life)
- Zepeto (a metaverse app)
The big question, of course, is in which circumstances, if any, people will want to use mobile games or virtual experience for real-world shopping. In each of the above examples, Walmart and Unity are focusing on providing actual versions of in-app clothing or goods. For that to work, there needs to be significant congruence between real-world items and in-app items, and people need to want a built-from-atoms version of what they have in digital form.
There’s plenty of opportunity. Unity says 1.1 million developers use its software to ship 3.6 billion app downloads every month. And Walmart, of course, has over 10,000 stores, annual revenue of over $600 billion, and 240 million customers in 19 countries.
At the very least, it’s an interesting attempt. The long vision might be something like Ready Player One: immersive shopping experiences with real-world consequences.
