Investments in the metaverse are coming with important strings attached
The rush to capture the metaverse frontier has led to a $2 billion investment in Epic Games from Sony and Kirkbi (which owns the Lego Group) this week. Days before the announcement, Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, also launched a partnership with Lego to design a metaverse community for children. Chief among the goals for the collaboration is the mission to protect children by focusing on privacy and well being in the metaverse, and providing children and their parents with the tools to control their experiences.
This focus on the protection and safety of children and other vulnerable groups has become an increasingly loud drumbeat around the topic of the metaverse as critics point to the troubled trajectory of Facebook.
On Monday, the same day that Epic Games received its multibillion-dollar boost, corporate activism group SumOfUs released “Risky Business, an investor briefing on Meta,” (pdf) a report meant to compel Meta to hire an independent group to study the “potential psychological and civil and human rights harms of a metaverse.”
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