Welcome to episode 15 of This Week in the Metaverse, a weekly show in which I provide commentary on three news items with fantastic guest co-hosts.

Joining me today as guest co-host is Jonathan Stringfield, whom we recently hosted on our podcast! Jonathan is currently the VP of global business research and marketing at Activision Blizzard and recently published a new book - Get In The Game.

Our three topics for the past week:

First, we talk about investments into avatar-focused ventures and this week we’ve seen announcements on two deals that are noteworthy: the first one is Inworld AI which raised $50M to populate games and the metaverse with smart characters. the second one is Ready Player Me, a cross-game metaverse avatar platform that allows users to explore virtual worlds with one consistent identity, has closed a $56 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Then, we talk about Bloomberg’s conversation with Xbox’s chief Phil Spencer as hopes for fewer exclusive titles by Xbox and would like to see more interoperability among consoles in the future.

We finish with news from The Sandbox, the blockchain-based platform of virtual worlds that aspires to become an open metaverse launched this week its alpha season 3 with 90 metaverse experiences and 100 hours of gameplay that’s available for users.