Metaverse Storefront: Retail Gravity Model

Your Storefront

Marketing budget $40/day

Price per item $30

Plot distance from hub 9.0 u

Product diversity 4 lines

Today's Performance

Daily visitors

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Market share

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Daily profit

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Brand equity

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Next customer wave in

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Plaza Standings

How it works

Every few seconds a fresh wave of shoppers spawns at the central portal. Each shopper's destination is decided by the Huff gravity model, a real retail-location formula used by economists and urban planners since the 1960s to predict how a trade area splits between competing stores:

S_i = Marketing_i^0.5 · Quality_i · (100/Price_i)^0.6
P(store i) = (S_i / D_i^β) / Σ_j (S_j / D_j^β)      [β = 1.5]

S_i is a store's pulling power — bigger with more marketing spend, more product lines, and a lower price. D_i is straight-line distance from the hub, raised to a decay exponent β so far-away stores lose customers faster than they lose visibility. Each shopper independently rolls against these probabilities, so the four glowing avatar streams you see are literally that day's draws from the model.

Marketing budget — raises S_i but is subtracted from profit every day, so overspending on ads you don't need burns cash.
Price — higher price raises revenue per sale but lowers S_i (and hence how many sales happen at all); there is a real trade-off, not a free lunch.
Plot distance — plots near the hub are busier (small D_i) but cost more rent, modelled as rent ∝ 1/D_i.
Product diversity — more product lines raise Quality_i but each line adds a small daily upkeep cost.
Brand equity — a slow exponential moving average of your recent market share that feeds back into Quality_i, so a shop that has been winning keeps a small compounding edge, and a shop that has been losing slowly loses its shine too.

Real-world relevance: this is the same gravity-model logic real chains use to pick store sites and forecast cannibalization between locations — the metaverse setting is new, the location economics are not.

Day 1

Your shop Competitor A Competitor B Competitor C

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Metaverse Storefront: A Retail Gravity Model