We know this story will sound nuts at first, but hear us out, okay? What’s going on is that the superstore Walmart has made a unique partnership with Unity. Following us so far? The goal of this team-up is for Walmart to help the company with games that use its gaming engine so that players can buy things they see in the game in real life. Confused? Think of it like this. Imagine you’re playing a house-building simulator, and it has a special couch that you can put in your home. If you said, “I wish I had that couch in my actual home,” then this partnership could help you do that.
Through the collaboration, you can potentially access Walmart, find that specific couch, and buy it. As a result, you can make your real life more accurate to the virtual life you have. Ironically, the superstore has already partnered with others to do this, and teaming up with Unity will help expand its reach and possibly its sales.
As noted by Insider Gaming, one of the heads of this collaboration had this to say about it:
“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.”
So, what does this mean for the gaming space going forward? Well, it could mean that we’ll see more things like this should it actually work out. Obviously, not every game would be capable of doing such things for one reason or another. After all, we’re pretty sure Walmart doesn’t have a Buster Sword that we can buy. Or, at least, they don’t have one just yet.
But it does raise certain ethical questions about what to keep in the “real world” and what to keep in the virtual world. Yes, Walmart isn’t doing anything illegal by doing this partnership or using this technology to “help gamers get what they want.” But aren’t games supposed to help take you out of the real world? Plus, we know companies have pushed boundaries in the past.
We’ll just have to see how this goes.
