What a time to be alive.
There’s no polite way to say this, so I’ll say it like this:
This is fucking pathetic.
So, we’re all agreed, right? Justifiable homicide?
Godot meanwhile…
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.”
There’s been a few Store-something Simulator lately, soo maybe
Oddly enough that’s not far from how many Unity games already felt.
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.
Products that are only sold at Walmart or something they have a deal to market? 🤷♀️
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.
I cannot imagine wanting that to be in a game you’re playing
Is this actually real? Is it really no a satire?
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.
Welcome to the future.
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…)
