Fortnite Maker Epic Games Buys SuperAwesome

Epic Games

Epic Games’ groundbreaking antitrust court brawl with Apple Inc. hasn’t stalled the North Carolina-based game maker’s growth.

Epic Games, maker of the popular game Fortnite that boasts 2.5 billion fans, announced Friday (Sept. 25) it has purchased SuperAwesome and its Kids Web Services. The London-based company provides a parental consent management platform for publishers of children’s websites and apps.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“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,” said SuperAwesome Co-Founder and CEO Dylan Collins in statement. “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. We’re proud and excited to be working together to make the internet safer for kids.”

SuperAwesome said its clients include more than 300 brands, including Hasbro, LEGO and NBC Universal to make digital access safe for more than 500 million families monthly across thousands of apps, games and services.

The deal comes three days after Epic invested $15 million in a funding round for Manticore Games, the San Mateo, California developer of Core, a digital community designed to create what it calls new play experiences.

Manticore said Core is an “endless universe of games to play and worlds to explore designed by a global community of creators.”

Details of the transaction were not provided.

“We admire Epic’s leadership in empowering our industry through technology and feel very aligned in a vision of the future for a user-generated multiverse,” said Frederic Descamps, co-founder and CEO of Manticore Games in a statement. “We are leading a complete democratization of the landscape in how games are made and played, and even who makes and plays games.”

In August, a battle began between Apple and Epic when the game maker released a payment platform that would bypass the App Store’s payment system and its 30 percent commission.

In response, Apple said it would end Epic’s access to the App Store and argued in court that Epic violated Apple’s rules. Epic filed suit alleging that the tech giant’s practices are anticompetitive. A judge is expected to hear what could be a landmark case later this month.