Walmart Inc. has taken its first step into the metaverse.
On 27 September 2022, Walmart announced that it would be joining Roblox with two new experiences for young users: “Walmart Land” and “Walmart Game World” (Walmart, 2022).
This is another major company “in” Roblox, following giants such as Nike, Samsung, VF, Gucci and Spotify (Bradley, 2022). Walmart has chosen Roblox as its first stop in the meta-universe, and the reason is not too complicated – Roblox has a huge number of users, and that number is growing fast.
With the epidemic, the online gaming platform Roblox has grown from 32.6 million daily active users in 2020 to over 53.3 million in June 2022, most of whom are children and teenagers, in their mid-25s or younger (Landsberg, 2022). They can create their own games on Roblox, play other users’ games and interact with each other. “Roblox is one of the fastest growing and largest platforms in the virtual world, and we know our customers are spending a lot of time there.” William White, chief marketing officer of Walmart US, said in a statement (Walmart, 2022). In addition to Roblox, Walmart has also entered TikTok and Twitter aggressively and has hosted shoppable live events (Aghadjanian, 2021).
With this move, Walmart wants to attract more young people of the Z generation and from what we can see Roblox is a good choice. With Nike’s virtual world Nikeland reportedly receiving 21 million visits and VF’s Vans World receiving around 81 million visits (Webscrypto, 2022), Roblox becomes a great channel for large brands to reach out to the younger generation.
However, while Roblox has a huge number of users, several Roblox players said that the current metaverse products are still relatively poorly made. Similar to playing Sandbox before, the UX of Roblox is pretty rough (de Mello, 2022). This may have something to do with the fact that historically it was focused on the gaming experience of kids.
I think the future of the metaverse will offer a variety of possibilities for companies with various business models. But there is still a lot to do before the metaverse becomes a mainstream market. Metaverse projects in the next phase should focus more on the evolution in terms of UX design, graphic design and, of course, decentralization.
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