Epic Games Acquires Kid Tech Platform SuperAwesome
Fortnite maker wants to develop safe services for children's digital experiences
Epic Games, maker of Fortnite, has acquired SuperAwesome, a tech platform that strives to make the internet safer for kids.
Together, the companies will build kid-safe services that protect children’s privacy and help create safer digital experiences. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“More kids interact online than ever before, and now is the time to double down on their safety. SuperAwesome is the company developers want to work with to make better online content for kids,” Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, said in a statement.
SuperAwesome has 150 employees, all of whom will be joining Epic Games, according to an Epic Games spokesperson.
SuperAwesome has partnerships with over 300 brands, include Lego, NBCUniversal and Hasbro. In May, it struck a global deal with WPP to give the holding company’s agencies access to SuperAwesome’s tools, including a software platform that reviews ads to make sure they’re appropriate for kids.
That platform, called AwesomeAds, will allow developers to offer kid-safe monetization in their products, meaning that a child’s data isn’t captured when an ad is served.
“The internet was never designed for kids, so we started SuperAwesome to make it as easy as possible to enable safe, privacy-driven digital experiences for children everywhere. Partnering with Epic Games gives us the opportunity to deliver that promise on a scale which simply wouldn’t have been possible on our own,” Dylan Collins, co-founder and CEO of SuperAwesome, said in a statement.
London-based SuperAwesome was founded in 2013, and delivers 12 billion kid-safe transactions every month, according to a company blog post. Through the acquisition, SuperAwesome’s goal is to scale its platform to deliver roughly twice the amount of kid-safe transactions, according to the same post.
Epic Games is currently locked in a legal battle with Apple and Google, which have both removed the developer’s games from their platforms over what it claims are anti-competition practices. The dispute began when Epic Games directed its users to pay the developer directly instead of through Apple’s App Store, which violates Apple’s policies.
