Would you pay $17,000 for a digital kitten?
Sky is the limit for physical product companies in the digital market
A new location-based iPhone app called Aglet is the Pokemon Go for sneakerheads, where users earn digital currency through real-life steps, as well as in-app purchases (of course). They spend this currency on buying digital versions of limited-edition sneakers. In a Forbes Magazine article “Where People Spend Thousands Of Dollars On Sneakers That Don’t Exist,” app creator Ryan Mullins said, “I want to build what YouTube was for the last generation of media creators. I want to build the platform for the next generation of sneaker designers or fashion designers.”
And that future is lucrative. According to the article, “more than 20,000 [users] have plunked down cash for Gold Aglet, a purchase ranging in price from 99 cents to $99.99. Nearly a dozen have spent several thousands of dollars each.”
Another fashion app getting in on the digital product sales is Drest, a virtual styling game where users pay real money for digital versions of high-end designer clothes. Unlike Aglet, designers are getting in on the action, with brands like Gucci partnering to create sought-after looks for the game. “The virtual world is creating its own economy,” CMO Robert Triefus told Fast Company. “Virtual items have value because of their own scarcity, and because they can be sold and shared.” This scarcity is creating a virtual economy that behaves in many ways like a traditionally economy, even though the scarcity is entirely artificial.
The Fast Company article also led me to a fascinating research project called Virtual Economy by Atletier, a must-read (or at least scroll) for anyone working in digital. A few mind-blowing facts:
In September 2018, a digital kitten sold for $170,000.
In 2010, a nightclub within the game Entropia Universe sold for $635,000.
Global virtual multi-player gaming and virtual simulation platforms and interactive media revenue reached around $109 billion in 2019 and is projected to hit almost $129 billion by 2021, higher than the $96 billion of the film industry
The pandemic has contributed to an “immediate and significant rise in streaming viewership, gaming participation, and virtual spending.”
Thanks to another great newsletter, FKPXLS, for sending me down this rabbit hole.
RIP RBG
If you haven’t yet watched RBG the documentary and the movie On the Basis of Sex, put them at the top of your list. Not only was Ruth Bader Ginsburg a hero, icon, and dissenter, as the tagline of the documentary declares, but she was a brilliant problem solver. She understood her audience, an all-male supreme court, and rather than attempting to persuade them to make sweeping changes to apply the law equally to both genders, she fought one outdated law at a time. And the reason it worked? She targeted cases where a man was the victim of discrimination.
Image via CNN Films
Will companies actually change the way they think about offices?
There’s a lot of talk about the pandemic being the catalyst that finally makes telecommuting the norm. Amazon, Google, Facebook and many other companies implemented policies to allow employees to work from home permanently. Bloomberg reports that California’s Bay Area “set a requirement that large office-based employers should have at least 60% of their employees work remotely on any given workday by 2050.”
But many companies are also starting to reopen offices, reporting less productivity and camaraderie with a remote workforce.
Rather than returning to the usual skyscrapers and cubicles, I hope companies reform their stale-air buildings for alternatives that better support physical and mental health. Future workspaces should use what we’ve learned during the pandemic to make working side-by-side safe and enjoyable. This LA parking lot project is an inspiring example, with fresh air, green spaces, and natural light.
Make your sports-reporting dream a reality in MLB’s Film Room.
While watching my team, the Atlanta Braves, clinch their spot in the 2020 playoffs (woo!) I saw an ad for Film Room, an MLB web app where you can scroll through baseball highlight clips from tonight’s games, all the way back to 1929. You can select clips and stitch them together to make highlight reels to share. The search, filter, select, and create reel interactions are well-designed user experiences, even if you’re not an aspiring baseball scout.
Thanks for reading! I’m a UX designer and writer, and design-adjacent content writer. If you’d like to be featured in the next issue of UX Adjacent, send me a short bio and links to your website or profiles.