Walmart continues to bet on immersive commerce and virtual games to attract young shoppers to buy Walmart products. This time the retailer is going after the 3 billion active gamers online.
On Wednesday, the company released its first web-based gaming title, “Walmart Unlimited,” on Spatial, an interactive 3D gaming platform, in partnership with Unity Software, a developer that creates tools to make video games across devices.
“Weʼre inviting gamers into this environment to experience and discover a brand available at Walmart,” Justin Breton, director of brand experience and partnerships at Walmart, told Retail Brew.
The three-episode miniseries for audiences 18+ features a hero supplier with products sold at Walmart. In the debut episode, players follow the character Milo—based on an actual Spatial community member who also provides the voiceover—as he navigates through an environment that draws inspiration from Caribbean food brand A Dozen Cousins, whose products are available at Walmart.
“Through that game play, you’re learning about A Dozen Cousins, and the next time that you walk into a Walmart store a week later, and you’re walking down the aisle where those products are sitting, you actually now have a higher likelihood of grabbing those products and trying them than maybe you would have having previously not played Walmart Unlimited,” Breton said.
Last September, Walmart also started selling goods on gaming platform Roblox. Breton said that with the Roblox activation, there is lift in sales of products it has featured.
“It starts to become a full-funnel activation that’s leaning into gaming as the mechanism to drive that engagement, product discovery, and conversion,” Breton added. Products sold through Walmart’s latest activation are priced from “a few dollars up to $20,” he said.
The next two episodes of Walmart Unlimited will be released in April and May, respectively. Each character from Milo to Raya (in episode two) and Jabari (in episode three), are inspired by and voiced by real entrepreneurs from the Spatial community.
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