A group of veterans in the video game industry has teamed up to form Avalon Corp, a Web3 gaming company. Recently, the company raised $13 million in a funding round led by Bitkraft Ventures. Other companies that participated in the funding round include Coinbase Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Delphi Digital, and Hashed.
Angel investors like Kevin Lin, Twitch cofounder, as well as Charlie Songhurst, former Microsoft executive, among several others also participated in the funding round. The money raised by Avalon Corp will be used for building a new interoperable digital universe.
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“It’s rare to find a company that has the vision, leadership, and expertise in many verticals to produce a revolutionary game and product,” said Jeremy Parris, an investor at Delphi Digital. “We at Delphi Digital believe that Avalon Corp has brought together all the elements across the board to push the standard of gaming, the metaverse, and the new tech it’s harnessing. The future is closer than many think.”
Avalon consists of a slew of experienced game developers who have previously worked with big names in the gaming industry like Sony, Blizzard, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts. The Orlando, Florida-based company believes it has what it takes to solve the problems that designers and creators will likely face in the near future.
Avalon Corp is building a platform that would one day exploit the benefits of the metaverse. It is working on an interoperable universe, linked together through technologies like blockchain technology and game engines. The flagship product which will be built in Unreal Engine 5 will have some MMO elements too.
In an interview with GamesBeat, Avalon CEO, Sean Pinnock said, “We imagine that, in the future, people will work together with tools that make it really easy to build worlds and experience those dreams. Those experiences put together could create something like the metaverse.”
Pinnock doesn’t see Avalon as a metaverse
While there have been reports that Avalon will be a sort of metaverse, Decrypt reached out to Pinnock for further explanation. During the interview, Pinnock said that they don’t see Avalon as metaverse in the strict sense because of how the word has been misused.
“Everyone’s kind of hopping onto this word just beating the poor word to death,” said Jeffrey Butler, Avalon’s Chief Product Officer.
“At Avalon, we are creating an interoperable universe for creators to build the content of their dreams,” said Pinnock. “Our vision of something like a—not metaverse—we imagine that to build such a thing is incredibly challenging and, in fact, impossible for a single company to do it. We’d like to empower gamers, creators, and anyone to build worlds. Those worlds over time interconnected could become something like an Oasis from Ready Player One.”
How Avalon Corp began
Pinnock disclosed that for a long time, he had the dream of building a digital universe which inspired his career in game development. However, he was unsure of how or where to start. After seeing Butler give a talk on Everquest Next, it dawned on him that they shared the same visions.
Eventually, Butler shared with Pinnock details of a game he wanted to build. To his greatest surprise, Pinnock was completing his sentences.
At that time Butler was working on an online game called Vanguard and shared the dream with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney. While Sweeney wanted developers to utilize Unreal for creating something like the metaverse, Butler wanted it to be open.
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“I’m deeply concerned about a metaverse being created by another company that is making something from a dystopian nightmare. The ethos of what it is that we’re doing is entirely against that,” Pinnock said. “How do we democratize and decentralize the metaverse? These are critical components that I wish more people were talking about.”
Pinnock and Butler entered a form of partnership about a year and a half ago. Their goal was to build game worlds full of people and joy. Pinnock has a wealth of experience working on indie games and virtual reality titles.
On the other hand, Butler had worked on early MMOs. Bringing this wealth of experience together and backed by $13 million in funding, Avalon holds a lot of promise.
The funds will go into building the universe’s foundational structure
According to Pinnock, the fund raised by the company will be used for building the universe’s foundational structure. Other issues that will be addressed at this stage include scalability, real-time interaction, and easy-to-use tools.
“We are solving a lot of really difficult technical challenges,” said Pinnock.
According to Butler, the team at Avalon want to build tools that will make developers feel like they are playing a game within a game, rather than feeling like building Unreal or Maya. Also, ordinary users can leverage generative AI to build exciting user-generated content.
“We want a young person, an inexperienced game developer, or an experienced developer to be able to easily create a triple-A quality experience in a weekend with their friends,” Pinnock said.
While Avalon is not entirely new, Pinnock said what differentiates his company from other rivals like Manticore Games that offer user-generated game worlds is that Avalon leverages myriads of cutting-edge technologies like NPC AI, worlds like Coruscant from Star Wars, and techs like Nanite.
“We are excited about things that would really blow people’s minds and be very easy to create,” Pinnock said.
Although Avalon Corp is based in Orlando, its team is spread across different cities in the United States as well as span 10 countries. At the moment, they have 30 full-time staff and dozens of others on contract.
They are recruiting more people across the globe and want the team to remain remote for now. The goal is to build a sizable company by the time their first product ships out.
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