Walmart Digs Deeper Into Metaverse With Minecraft Partnership

Walmart is reportedly expanding metaverse efforts by teaming with virtual gaming world Minecraft.

The retail giant is now running a limited-time interactive gaming experience dubbed “Skyward” on a Minecraft Java server, Chain Store Age reported Friday (March 21).

According to the report, Skyward lets players 13 and older explore different planets while searching for a “Golden Child.” Aside from the gaming experience, Walmart is also offering Minecraft-themed merchandise on a dedicated page on the Walmart eCommerce site and the company’s Skyward Discord server.

As Chain Store Age noted, Walmart has for the last few years been steadily increasing its presence in the metaverse. For example, the company recently launched “Walmart Unlimited,” another in-game commerce experience, in collaboration with 3D gamified media platform Spatial and the Unity real-time 3D development environment.

Walmart and Unity launched an “immersive commerce” partnership last year that allows Unity developers to weave Walmart’s commerce application programming interfaces (APIs) directly into their games and apps. This capability lets creators sell physical products in real-time 3D (RT3D) on more than 20 platforms.

“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,” Tom Kang, then-general manager for metaverse commerce at Walmart, said at the time.

Walmart’s continued metaverse push comes at a time when “the popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) has put some vigor back into virtual reality/extended reality (VR/XR) virtual worlds,” as PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.

For example, Florida’s Infinite Reality, an XR company that lets users create 3D websites in the metaverse, raised $3 billion in a January funding round.

At the same time, Meta — which was so confident in the future of the metaverse that it changed its corporate name — now seems to be questioning the viability of things like Horizon Worlds, an immersive, virtual reality experience.

As Business Insider reported last month Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told workers in Reality Labs — the home of its metaverse and wearables products — that “this year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure.”

That report cited a memo from the CTO which said, “We need to drive sales, retention and engagement across the board but especially in MR (mixed reality).

“And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long-term plans to have a chance,” Bosworth added.