Let’s look at the latest gaming news along with the metaverse news. Avalon Corp was started by a group of people who worked in the video game business. Bitkraft Ventures led a round of funding that brought in $13 million.
Hashed, Delphi Digital, Mechanism Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and others were among those who took part in the round. Angel investors included Kevin Lin, who helped start Twitch, and Charlie Songhurst, who used to work at Microsoft and is now an angel investor.
Avalon Corp creates content, not traditional metaverse
The people on the Avalon team are all experienced game developers who have worked for companies like Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Blizzard, and Sony. Avalon is the most important project from the new game studio. It was made with Unreal Engine 5 and has MMO and metaverse features.
But Avalon Corp CEO Sean Pinnock and Chief Product Officer Jeffrey Butler noted in an interview that they do not think of Avalon as a traditional metaverse because the term has been taken over and used too much.
“Everyone’s kind of hopping onto this word and just beating the poor word to death,” Butler said of the word “metaverse.” He said that almost every big brand, from fashion to fast food, has said they want to make their metaverse.
“At Avalon, we are creating an interoperable universe for creators to build the content of their dreams. And [in] our vision of something like a—not metaverse—we imagine that to build such a thing is incredibly challenging and impossible for a single company to do it,” Pinnock said.
“We’d like to empower gamers, creators, anyone to build worlds. And then those worlds over time interconnected could become something like an Oasis from Ready Player One.”
Pinnock and Butler think that game developers, not consumer brands, will bring the truest form of any “metaverse” to life. This is because developers have the experience to make a AAA game work.
Avalon uses Ethereum Layer 2 protocols
They do think, though, that once it’s built, Avalon could host major brands that want to stake their claim in its universe with their intellectual property and customized experiences. (Pinnock said that Avalon’s COO used to be the Head of Business Development at Bandai Namco’s North American division, which owns the IP rights to famous Japanese properties like Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, and One Piece.)
Pinnock has shown a strong preference for Ethereum Layer 2 protocols, but Avalon hasn’t picked a blockchain yet to support and enable its interoperable economy (i.e. Polygon, ImmutableX).
Pinnock said, “I personally am a big fan of Layer two Ethereum protocol. What’s great about that technology is the gas price for transactions is significantly less than the cost of a credit card swipe, which has a great low environmental impact. We’re also able to get the scalability we need for transactions. In terms of how blockchain will be used in Avalon, digital ownership is going to be key here. So all of our assets inside of Avalon will be certified through the blockchain.”
What is Avakon?
The Avalon team thinks that crypto is the best way to make a fully decentralized metaverse when it is done right and not as a “walled garden.”
“This is going to be one of the most invasive technologies ever built by society, it’s incredibly important that this technology is actually decentralized,” Pinnock added. “How do we do that? That’s a really tough problem to solve.”
Butler has worked in video games since 1999. He spent almost a decade at Sony Online Entertainment working on games like Everquest. He says that modern technology like Unreal Engine 5 lets the team make a real-world version of the kind of massively multiplayer universe they want.
Avalon, on the other hand, will be much more than just a digital universe to explore. It will be game-like, and users will be able to move assets from one “world” to another using crypto and NFTs.
“For us, gamification is incredibly important. I grew up modding Warcraft III a lot, I was actually not the creator, but I was an original Dota modder and made my own Dota spinoff as well as a ton of other games,” Pinnock said.
“And what I believe made Warcraft III’s modding community so successful was that there was a game to build around, there was a framework. And so we are going to build our own framework.”
Avalon is also looking into using generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology to let users build their own worlds. To do this, they are looking for long-term partnerships with AI companies.
The developers want Avalon to be an AAA-quality game, but they know that not every PC will have the right hardware to run it smoothly.
“There will be a cloud offering for Avalon,” Pinnock said of his plans for a cloud gaming component, where data is hosted and rendered online as opposed to on the user’s computer. “Anyone with a web browser could play this game.”
Content Source: decrypt.co
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