Digital commerce platform Shopify is betting that game developers want more ways to sell real, physical goods from inside their games, as the company this week rolled out a Unity plugin for doing just that: Unity Buy.
If you’re making games with Unity, this means you now have a new, relatively easy way to sell merchandise (t-shirts! socks! manuals!) from within your game — assuming you’re willing to set up a Shopify storefront and pay the requisite costs.
What’s kind of fun about this is that, as Shopify points out, you can use the SDK to generate customized goods for each player. That means you can conceivably use it to generate real, physical prints of the screenshots players take (a la Firewatch) or sell players actual custom hats based on what achievements they’ve unlocked in your game.
For further details and a guide to getting started, check out Shopify’s dev portal.