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Avalon Corporation has raised $13 million to create a new interoperable digital world. Or you could call it part of the metaverse.
The company was founded by the leaders of such games as EverQuest, Call of Duty, Diablo, God of War, Assassin’s Creed and Elden Ring.
The Orlando, Florida-based company believes its leaders have unique experience in tackling the challenges creators and designers will face in the near future.
The company is building a gaming platform that could one day take advantage of the Metaverse. It envisions an interoperable universe connected by technologies such as game engines and blockchain technology. Avalon CEO Sean Pinnock said in an interview with GamesBeat that he doesn’t call his platform “the metaverse” because “we don’t think one company can build it.”
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“We envision a future where people collaborate using tools that make it really easy to build worlds and make dreams come true. Combining these experiences could create something like the Metaverse,” Pinnock said.
“We have the ability to change the digital world, and we firmly believe that we are the right team to ensure that these changes benefit creators and players alike,” Pinnock said. “We know that engagement is driven by play, creativity, and human connection, and these are key elements that are sorely lacking in most self-proclaimed metaverses, so the inevitable convergence of technology that comes along with the metaverse will dominate games. , Developer builds.
Chief Product Officer Jeffrey Butler said in an interview with GamesBeat: “We want it to be more than just one company. I don’t think there is one company that can really create technology for the Metaverse. NPC AI, building tools and various technologies combine to create the perfect storm.”
Pinnock said that the Metaverse should be an interactive universe with multiple worlds, such as the Ready Player One Oasis, with different intellectual property in those worlds. Creators can create these different worlds and provide interaction between them.
“We’re trying to avoid the word ‘metaverse’ because it’s been causing a lot of controversy lately,” Butler said. “We laughed that KFC created a metaverse.”
Pinnock said the company will allow other creators to create worlds in their universe, but Avalon will also build their own.
“We’re building technology that makes it easy to deploy what we consider AAA,” he said. “So, with a coherent set of rules from experience to experience, users have the ability to create a whole world of content news. I think we’ll probably publish some of our own content as well to start with.”
Remixing content is important, Butler said. He said that it would be interesting if Gandalf had a lightsaber and fought Captain Picard, who wore the Ring of Omnipotence.
“We can’t talk about compatibility and tools without thinking about these concepts and making sure we’re building systems that allow us to resolve these conflicts in our game or in your game,” Butler said.
“Whatever the digital future, it is clear that no company can build it,” Butler said. “At Avalon Corp, we want to be the spark that ignites worlds that gamers have only dreamed of with our own unique experience, vision and imagination.”
Bitkraft Ventures, Hashed, Delphi Digital and Mechanism Capital led the round, which also included Coinbase Ventures, Yield Guild Games, Merit Circle, Avocado Guild and Morningstar Ventures.
The round also included Kevin Lin, co-founder of Twitch, Charlie Songhurst, former head of corporate strategy at Microsoft, Dennis Fong, CEO of GGWP, and Robin Yung, former CEO of Pearl Abyss.
“Few companies have the vision, leadership and experience to create game-changing games and products in so many areas,” Delphi Digital investor Jeremy Parris said in a statement. bar for games, the Metaverse and its new technologies that are moving forward significantly. The future is closer than many people think.
“The connected world is evolving at an unprecedented pace and is ultimately a Darwinian game where the most appropriate and useful platforms will thrive and stay alive,” Hashed investor Jun Park said in a statement. Corp, led by visionary industry veterans, will help the company realize its potential and usher in the next wave of the interoperable world.”
“At Bitkraft, our investments are based on a synthetic reality, a confluence of the physical and digital worlds that, like the Internet, will lead to new human experiences and unprecedented social and economic opportunities,” said Carlos, partner at Bitkraft Ventures Pereira. statement. “We envision highly social virtual worlds of shared adventure and economics, and see Avalon as the ideal system to enable these digital societies to be built beyond what we have seen so far.”
Pinnock says he always dreamed of creating an eternal digital world, so he got into game development. But he didn’t know where to start. He saw Butler perform at Everquest Next and realized that they had a similar vision.
Butler told Pinnock about the game he wanted to make, and Pinnock began to finish sentences. Butler was shocked to find that they both wanted to create the same game world.
Butler spoke about digital ownership and the power of user-generated content, and when Butler was developing an online game called Vanguard, he spoke about those dreams with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.
Sweeney wants developers to use Unreal to create something like the Metaverse. Butler wants it open.
“I am deeply concerned about a metaverse created by another company that is making things out of a dystopian nightmare. The spirit of what we’re doing is completely against it,” Pinnock said. “How do we democratize and decentralize the Metaverse? These are key components that I would like more people to talk about.
Butler and Pinnock started working together about a year and a half ago. They want to build a game world that is not empty, but full of people and joy. Pinnock has developed indie games, virtual reality games, and games for Universal Studios and Dave & Busters.
Butler worked on early MMO games. He worked on the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet longer than on More Than Sean.
He said, “I need youthful energy. The craziness is that I meet a lot of friends who work in the industry. I’ve met 75 year olds at raves and they love the games we play. I met 15 year olds. Man, they love the game we play. That’s what she’s about. It’s about youthful bloom.
Butler, who worked on EverQuest in the 1990s, said he believes today’s tools, such as generative artificial intelligence, are much more effective at helping people create worlds that once required armies to create. He believes that people should have an easy way to edit what other people have created and earn money for their contribution to the process.
Pinnock said the company is using the money to build infrastructure for the universe. This includes addressing issues such as real-time interaction, scalability, and easy-to-use human tools.
These tools should be easy to use. They should be less like being created in Maya or Unreal, and more like a game within a game, Butler said. According to Pinnock, generative AI will help ordinary users create amazing user-generated content.
“We want young people, inexperienced game developers or experienced developers to be able to easily create AAA-quality games with friends on the weekends,” Pinnock said.
“And I also want people who create content for life, like game developers, to feel just as comfortable using our creations to realize their vision of games,” Butler added.
Competitors include Manticore Games and its main platform for user-created game worlds. Pinnock said there are similarities, but said his company is taking advantage of many new technologies such as NPC AI and technologies like nanites and worlds like Star Wars’ Coruscant.
“We’re really excited about something that really hits people and is really easy to create,” Pinnock said.
The company is technically based in Orlando, Florida, but the team is spread across the US and many cities in 10 countries. In total, the company employs 30 full-time employees and dozens of contractors. They are hiring more people, looking for people around the world and will stay remote first and foremost. They intend to build a company of significant size when they deliver the product.
They want to talk more about what they are building, but for now they are forced to remain silent about it. They use blockchain technology because they see decentralization as a way to democratize game creation. They also see it as key to digital ownership, interoperability and payment principles of digital assets.
“We want to break the paradigm, and blockchain technology is perfect for that,” Butler said. “The most important thing for me is to do it in such a way that there is no centralized control. When you start thinking about virtual worlds, you want to do it in a way that avoids a dystopian future,” said Pinnow Gram.
They acknowledge that there are bad players in cryptocurrencies and blockchain games. But the company plans to put the technology to good use, Pinnock said. In this sense, blockchain is just a tool.
Pinnock would like Cosmos to eventually include content related to education, training, modeling, health and mental health. But they felt that gaming was the first area to take off.
The team wanted to bring the world of Cyberpunk 2077 to life, where players could meet and interact with their 3D avatars in multiplayer games. They want the players to be able to learn something or try to improve their mental health in such an environment. That’s what the Metaverse means to them.
“I’m really excited to finally talk about it,” Pinnock said. “But there is a lot we can’t talk about yet.
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Post time: Mar-13-2023