How Innersloth uses SuperAwesome’s Kids Web Services (KWS) to safely enable the best Among Us experience for its young players and their parents
“Among Us is loved by audiences all over the world, so ensuring everyone’s safety and being COPPA compliant was a huge priority for us. Working with SuperAwesome to tackle this challenge was a huge win. It helped us quickly and efficiently create a better community for our younger players (and their parents!)”
— Victoria Tran, Community Director at Innersloth
Few online games have seen such a sudden and massive explosion in popularity as Among Us, developed by Innersloth. With hundreds of millions of players, the hit game is especially loved by younger audiences and even won the 2021 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Award for Favorite Video Game. Player chat is critical to the Among Us experience — how else can you catch the impostor? This makes it critical for Innersloth to obtain verifiable parental consent in order to allow young audiences access to in-game chat functionality to be compliant with digital privacy laws like COPPA.
The Challenge
Digital privacy laws such as COPPA require developers to obtain parental consent to enable features, such as in-game chat, that may lead to the disclosure of personal identifiable information (PII) by a young player.
However, the process of obtaining Verifiable Parental Consent (VPC) can be challenging for the developer and disruptive to the user experience.
Innersloth needed a global solution that would allow parents to verify their identity and manage their children’s data preferences while minimizing user friction. Doing this in-house would require a dedicated team to build a VPC tool and manage verification partners in multiple legal jurisdictions, in compliance with local privacy laws. Not to mention budgeting for the huge expense incurred in the verification process for an audience of this scale.
The Solution
Innersloth used SuperAwesome’s Kids Web Services (KWS) to provide global parent verification and consent management flows in Among Us.
KWS takes care of enabling developers to obtain COPPA compliant Verifiable Parent Consent and allows Innersloth to focus entirely on the best game experience. Additionally, using KWS meant that Innersloth could streamline the parent verification user experience thanks to our unique KWS ParentGraph, which meant that many parents could directly grant permission for their kids to play Among Us without having to re-verify their identity, a huge user (and conversion!) improvement on traditional approaches. In addition to simplifying the global VPC process for Among Us, KWS saved Innersloth significant costs and resources.
Available entirely for free via Epic Online Services (SuperAwesome is owned by Epic Games), KWS’ parent verification service is provided to all developers to help make the internet safer for kids.
Sign up to KWS
See Kids Web Services in action
