Retail giant Walmart enters metaverse with Roblox for children

Walmart is opening its doors to a new generation of potential customers in the metaverse, targeting kids on Roblox, and not everyone is happy.

Walmart, a chain of supermarket stores in the United States, announced a partnership with Roblox to host a map named Walmart Land.

The retail chain calls it an “immersive experience in the metaverse.”

The metaverse is where a digital alternative life can take place — examples shown include people shopping at virtual malls and having the items delivered to the house, or learning trades through VR tech.

In reality, none of these systems exists — and won’t exist for quite some time — and often are inferior experiences to their real-life counterparts.

If you are interested in experiencing something close enough to the metaverse, except way more exciting than attending virtual board meetings, you can play any number of online games like Final Fantasy XIV.

The real issue is that Walmart is bringing branding and advertisement for their multi-billion dollar retail franchise to young children and claiming it as a big step forward for metaverse exploration.

Kids LOVE Walmart! They're always talking about Walmart on the playground! It's one of their favourite brands! They love brands! 10yos are passionate about grocery shopping! Let's bring Walmart to THEM! https://t.co/NXAexWfk1y

— Ryan Brown 🎮✨ (@Toadsanime) September 26, 2022

Walmart’s adventures into the metaverse include a partnership with Roblox to host two maps on the gaming platform designed for children — ‘Walmart Land’ and ‘Walmart’s Universe of Play.’

The two maps feature lots of Walmart branding, product ad placement, and maps that are, admittedly, quite large in scope.

Welcome to Walmart Land.

While the usual hooting and hollering can be heard from Silicon Valley techies and crypto influencers about how this is a major step forward in the race to the metaverse, whatever that entails, many others were more cautious about lauding Walmart for this advertisement-driven move into a child’s game.

“Advertising to children through an interactive world in roblox isn’t exactly where I thought living in a capitalistic hell would lead us but here we are,” said one commenter.

Others commented on how they hope to steal from Walmart Land just like in real life, or how they hope they don’t lose their VR job by taking a sick day and losing their health insurance (for the record, this scenario happens in the United States with surprising regularity.)

Walmart is hardly the first company to claim new ground in the race to the bottom for digital goods and the “metaverse.”

GameStop recently opened up an NFT marketplace but was immediately lambasted for attempting to sell a horrific 9/11 NFT.

The future of crypto in general isn’t much better — best case scenarios for NFTs in games, including the metaverse, involve labour abuse where players from poorer countries are paid pennies to entertain others.

Written by Junior Miyai on behalf of GLHF.