Paris Hilton will launch on Roblox a virtual island on which users of the platform will be able to attend a performance of the jet-setter, but not only. They will also have the opportunity to discover a whole universe to his glory.
Confused about what to do on New Years Eve? Note that you can take it with Paris Hilton. Covid requires, it will not be in a nightclub in Paris or Miami, but in the metaverse. Indeed, the American reality TV star will play an electronic music set on the evening of December 31 on his virtual island, on the collaborative video game platform Roblox. Popular with children and adolescents since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has nearly 50 million daily active users and is worth more than $ 57 billion on Wall Street.
In the virtual world of Roblox, players have the opportunity to build games and entertainment spaces, and share them with the rest of the community. In this context, Paris Hilton wanted to make a contribution to the building with its virtual island called “Paris World” on which Roblox users will be able to watch the performance of the jet-setter, but not only. Indeed, they will discover a whole universe to the glory of Paris Hilton. While walking around his virtual island, they will have the opportunity to visit the digital replicas of his Beverly Hills estate and his dog mansion.
While access to “Paris World” will be free for Roblox users, this virtual world will however be monetized through micro-transactions. These will allow players to purchase virtual clothing to customize their avatar or explore Paris Hilton Island in a luxury car or jet ski. “For me, the metaverse is a place where you can do in the digital world anything that you can achieve in real life. Not everyone gets the chance to experience this so this is what we have been working on for the past year.Paris Hilton told Reuters. This Roblox project in the metaverse is the latest from her 11:11 Media company, with which the 40-year-old American jet-setter launched the “This is Paris” podcast and the Netflix program “Cooking with Paris”.
Paris Hilton, who is also interested in NFTs, is far from the only celebrity to interfere in the metaverse. Indeed, the artists Travis Scott and Ariana Grande on Fortnite, or Lil Nas X on Roblox, have given several virtual concerts since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Brands are also investing in this booming sector, such as Tommy Hilfiger, who launched a digital ready-to-wear line for Roblox avatars, or Nike, which opened a virtual space called “Nikeland” , where visitors can play “dodgeball” (a sporting variant of the prisoner ball) with friends, don a pair of virtual Air Force 1 sneakers and win medals.
If Roblox and Fortnite have been on the rise for several months, the competition is likely to be much more intense in the coming years. And for good reason, Mark Zuckerberg has popularized the term “metaverse” in recent months. The boss of Facebook has great ambitions in this sector, to the point of having renamed his company Meta to display his ambitions in this area. Other tech giants, such as the Chinese Tencent and Baidu, which has just unveiled its “Xi Rang” virtual universe, are also interested in the metaverse, a market which is expected to “weigh” 800 billion dollars worldwide in 2024, according to the forecasts of Bloomberg.