Ready Player Me has 3,000 avatar partners.
Ready Player Me has 4,000 avatar partners.
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Will interoperable avatars be essential for the open metaverse? | Timmu Tõke

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 28 min

Back in February, Ready Player Me launched an experimental trial where players can use generative AI to craft their own avatar outfits in a variety of games. That combined the explosive trends of generative AI and user-generated content, and the New York company hopes this will lead us to the open metaverse.

I did a fireside chat about this topic Timmu Tõke, CEO of Ready Player Me, at the SXSW 2023 event last month in Austin, Texas. Tõke has been leaning into these trends — as well as the broader trend of personalization among a new generation of creators — for a long time. He started the company (now based in New York) in Talinn, Estonia in 2014. And nine years later, the company’s avatar platform is being used in more than 6,000 games.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.