Walmart extends metaverse gaming efforts to Minecraft, Discord
Walmart’s newest metaverse promotion integrates with the Minecraft virtual gaming environment and Discord gaming-themed chat platform.
In an email to Chain Store Age, Walmart announced it is running a limited-time interactive gaming experience called "Skyward" on a Minecraft Java server from Friday, March 21 to Thursday, May 15, 2025.
Skyward features a story-driven galactic adventure for players 13 and older who can join friends in exploring a town and embarking on missions across different planets to find the "Golden Child," who has left Earth to fulfill a dream.
In addition to the immersive gameplay in Skyward, Walmart will offer Minecraft-themed merchandise, including Walmart-exclusive "A Minecraft Movie" items. The full assortment is being sold on a dedicated page on the Walmart e-commerce site and will also be featured within Walmart’s Skyward Discord server where they can be seamlessly purchased online.
Items include action figures, Nerf super soakers, backpacks and school supplies.
Walmart increases metaverse commerce efforts
For the past three years, Walmart has been steadily growing its presence in the area of metaverse commerce. These efforts include another recently launched immersive in-game commerce experience called "Walmart Unlimited," in partnership with 3D gamified media platform Spatial and the Unity real-time 3D development environment.
The discount giant also integrated e-commerce into its existing collaboration with global social networking and avatar simulation app Zepeto.
Walmart has also launched Walmart Realm, a 3-D virtual shopping environment curated by digital influencers and built upon the Emperia metaverse platform in partnership with Sawhorse Productions, in May 2024 and offered a back-to-college shopping experience in July 2024.
[READ MORE: Walmart creates metaverse shop for college students, influencers]
In November 2024, Walmart Realm launched a holiday update which includes four new virtual shops inspired by social trends from Pinterest and TikTok, with gifts and holiday ideas curated by influencers.
The retailer debuted in the metaverse by launching two new metaverse experiences on Roblox in September 2022 and announced in September 2023 that it would deepen its commercial activity in "virtual worlds," becoming the first entity to sell select physical items on Roblox.
Walmart’s IRL commerce shop in the experience enables Roblox users to check out the real world items chosen by its partner user generated content (UGC) creators, MD17, Junozy & Sarabxlla. The company has also tested immersive commerce in a variety of online worlds, including the Supercampus gamified Roblox environment.
Headquartered in Bentonville, Ark., Walmart Inc. operates 10,750 stores and numerous e-commerce websites in 19 countries.
