The lust of money is truly the root of all evil.
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If you havent already made the switch to Godot, now is a good time
I have my own game engine.
I love how after seeing Godot's relentless pace of new, highly requested features, Unity went "hmm let's make it even easier for companies to cram in app purchases into their software"
But ... but literally nobody wants this. Nobody. Even the people who created it went home and gave themselves an uppercut.
Create some reality in your game! Add some Ads!
It‘s worse than ads. It‘s teleshopping for games. Like the purse of an NPC? One click buy the physical version.
Might have been cool if they provide 3D models, but it's just an affiliate marketing SDK.
Having free access to 3D models of real world objects might even worth the interaction.
The firm said the SDK helps gamemakers bring real-world products into gameplay, "bridg[ing] the gap between virtual gameplay and real-world retail" and permitting players to link their Walmart accounts and complete secure purchases without leaving their game.
So it's just direct integration with a fulfillment platform to ease merch transactions?
... dafuq?
So you can VR wallmart?
There's already a Walmart in Roblox
There's one in tear down as well but the advantage of that is you can blow it up. Or rip it apart with a hurricane. Or nuke it.
As someone who has way too many prop and item add-ons for GMod, I kind of agree.
I'm a sucker for admiring highly detailed objects. I've wanted to get HL: Alyx for a long time so I could just look at everything up close
HL: Alyx was worth getting a roomscale VR setup.
I want to do it right when I get it. I want to be able to use all my fingers and just be in the world
You know, that's what my favorite games need. I was just thinking how much better Expedition 33 would be if it also included grocery shopping
Is that UK law still in place where product placement is illegal?
I guess we will have to play UK versions in the future. Or petition the EU for a similar law
Product placement has never been illegal in the UK, and we don’t have Walmart anyway, so the functionality would be useless outside the US.
You probably still have Heinz ketchup and Coca-Cola. It's not that useless
They have Walmarts outside the US. Also it would be silly to build in the UK... Because they also own 10% of ASDA in the UK. Which are essentially super stores like Walmart.
There’s no polite way to say this, so I’ll say it like this:
This is fucking pathetic.
I could be wrong, but isn't the title a bit misleading? As far as I can tell, Walmart made an SDK thing and pushed it to the Unity asset store. I don't think Unity specifically went out of their way to make or promote it.
It appears their "Verified Solutions" program is meant to help make and promote it: https://docs.unity3d.com/2023.1/Documentation/Manual/verifiedsolutions.html
Finally we have a solution to "I want to play a game, but feel like I'm at Walmart."
The real question is: How is this ever going to make money for Walmart? The second a developer tries to put this in a game they're gonna be laughed off the internet.
They likely won't. More likely, the devs will put these products in the most funny places (say, billboards on the side of the road in American Truck Simulator). They'll keep this thing running for ~5 years and they'll axe it.
Products that are only sold at Walmart or something they have a deal to market? 🤷♀️
I've been thinking for a while about once vr gets adopted more we could make virtual reality storefronts to use instead of websites. It would be fun I think.
The concept of buying real items inside a videogame has never made sense to me.
A high quality VR store where I can actually physically browse the isles would be superior to trying to browse a 2D website. And being able to pick up a product, with a realistic 3D model, look at it from any angle and visually compare packaging sizes across brands - like I can in a real store but can't on a website - would be nice.
I can't tell you how many times I accidentally ordered a too small or too big version of something, because product photos on websites are always the same size (just fill the frame).
Of course, this will never happen. If a store had a budget to make this, they could use that budget to make their online shopping website 10x better instead.
One time, I got delivered teaspoons instead of spoons, because I couldn't tell the difference from the picture (and the description did not bother mentionuing that at all).
Another time, I got delivered light bulbs the size of a toddler's head, because the manufacturer decided to use a picture of a regular-size bulb. Well, and in the online store, the size only got mentioned as actual width/height values in the details.
But yeah, we do already have the technology to place a banana next to your product, and to take photos from all angles. Manufacturers and stores just don't see enough of a benefit from actually doing that, so have a singular picture in a white void, which shows a different product. You're welcome! 👍
With RickyRigatoni's idea, it wouldn't be a videogame. It would be a separate program you launch specifically to order things online. It just happens to use a game engine for its implementation, because game engines are the most advanced simulation tool humanity has developed...
I could see it for some things. It would be great for browsing 3D print models or furniture—items where the shape/size matter a lot.
Like, an IKEA app that uses AR passthrough to show furniture options in your space? That'd be really cool, if it could be trusted not to spy on you.
Or an interior design app, that gave you a variety of options it pulls from a variety of sources, and you could add items to your cart right from the app?
For 3D prints, it would be great to have a virtual storefront of models to see, pick up, rotate, etc. 3D print .STL files are shockingly large (often 100MB+ for a single model), so idk if it's realistic, but it would be a great use case if it was feasible. (My current special interest is showing...)
I had to check the URL several times to verify I wasn't reading an article on The Onion.
I want to see someone make a game where they use this API to track shrinkflation at walmart or something ridiculous like that. Surely some creative game dev could find a way to make this work against walmart.


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