Just to get everyone up to speed: Avalon is a coming MMO that is built on user generated content. They see themselves more as a metaverse toolbox, than a metaverse themselves. It’s fronted by MMO industry vets including Jeff Butler, who was a producer on EverQuest, co-founder with Brad McQuaid of Sigil (of Vanguard fame), and a lead designer of EverQuest Next.
So, he has earned a listen.
Avalon, like Roblox, Second Life, A Tale in the Desert, Neverwinter (to some extent and in the past, we’ll come back to that later), VR Chat, Wurm Online, and planned for EQ Next, will be a game that, by itself, won’t be much of a game. They will provide a setting; you’ll provide the game.
This can work. This can make creators money. Roblox is a perfect example. Ultima Online vet Raph Koster created Metaplace more than a decade ago and is doing it again now at Playable Worlds. It’s a hopping field these days. Everyone wants to make “Ready Player One” and “Snow Crash” real. For the kids. Probably. They say. Those two books were set in dystopias, by the way.
It was said, during the 19th century California Gold Rush, that the only people who made money were the people selling the picks and shovels. Most people found little to nothing. Those that hit a good lode were forced out by people with better guns and better sheriffs. You want to be the one running the general store. If the miner wins or loses, you still get paid. So Avalon is just following the Big Tech playbook, here:
- Attract people to the platform
- Have them make something they would be unwilling to throw away
- Have them urge other people onto the platform
- Sit back and let the network effect kick in
It’s what Facebook, Instagram (which is also Facebook), Tiktok, Twitter, YouTube and all those other big sites do: make it hard for you to stop making them money. And if you’re nice about it, maybe they’ll give you a taste of the money you earned them. It’s the way tech is right now. I know at least five people who spend all their time making content for YouTube and Twitch hoping, someday, not to get rich, but just to make a couple bucks someday. Hundreds of hours of content. Thousands of dollars in equipment. Doing everything they can to make money for Google and Amazon, for free. Kudos to them.
Can’t blame Avalon for trying.
What does Avalon have that Roblox, Second Life and VR Chat don’t?
Well, none of those have… blockchain.
Avalon will allow users to use Avalon-owned tools to put Avalon-owned assets together into an object, or a character, or a quest or whatever and call it yours. You can sell it to another Avalon user!
Cool, right?
Well, first, “blockchain” is just another kind of database. Second Life, Roblox, all of them, store owner data in a database. The only thing different with a blockchain is that anyone can read it. Not sure how that really benefits anyone, but okay. They also tend to be slow and expensive to update, so usually projects like this don’t actually store everything on the blockchain, they just store information on a private database and just put pointers into that in big block updates into the actual blockchain. These are called sidechains, and aren’t peer to peer like most blockchains, but are run entirely in-house. So, databases. Just like the other games.
You can sell your creations! And buy other people’s creations! Sure, through Avalon’s store, and they will take a cut. But you will only be able to sell your creation to other Avalon players. You won’t be able to take that cool PC you made and sell it to a World of Warcraft player, or drive that spaceship you made into Fortnite. If Avalon bans you, you have nothing. If they accidentally delete your account, you have nothing. If Avalon shuts down someday, nobody will have anything.
You could try copyrighting your creation. If you really owned it, you could. Any work of art created by a human can be copyrighted. Then nobody could do anything with it, without your permission. Even if Avalon closed down, that thing would still be legally yours.
But I am pretty sure that Avalon will not be in the business of letting their content creators assert ownership over their creations. Hey, I could be wrong. I just don’t see them opening themselves up to the legal liability of their player base suing them for copyright infringement when they sell your creation.
I know, I know, I am being harsh. But I gotta say. I was a content creator in an MMO, once. With Neverwinter. They had a system for user generated content called the “Foundry”. You could make characters, heck, you could make all new races. You could design quests, and worlds, huge multilevel dungeons, all sorts of stuff.
I still had the teaser I made for a quest called “Crushbone’s Revenge”. Most of my quests were EQ based. Oh well. In this one, I reconstructed (parts of) Lesser Faydark, Kelethin, Crushbone and the Plane of Hate and told an original story using a whole bunch of NPCs familiar to anyone who played EQ back in the day. Created the race of gnomes (Neverwinter didn’t have them, then). Created the race of clockworks. A lot of quest designing. That was just this one quest. I turned Shakespeare’s The Tempest into another gnome and clockwork-based comedy. I recreated my EverQuest static group in game and you could sit at a spawn point and pull stuff to them. That one had a memorial to a guildie who died in real life. You should have seen what I did with Befallen.
But you can’t, and neither can I, because one day Cryptic said “no more Foundry” and it was all gone. Those hundreds of hours just vanished and I never had any way of getting it out of the Foundry because all my quests were all built on Neverwinter assets using Neverwinter tools.
So yeah. When someone tells me they would like me to put in an immense amount of work to benefit a large corporation, I am a little skeptical. “Blockchain” is a magic word that is supposed to make you feel like you own something, but… you do not.
Billions of people have spent billions of hours and billions of dollars to make Mark Zuckerberg rich. The vast majority never saw a penny for all their hard work.
So if Jeff wants you to create content for him, make sure he pays you up front.
Avalon from the inside
So what will Avalon be like to play?
“In Avalon, players traverse a virtual universe through portals that can rapidly take them from a medieval world to a cyberpunk landscape. As Butler explained, to keep the game fair and curb potential intellectual property issues, Avalon’s mechanics will filter out in-game items like weapons or vehicles based on the type of world the player finds themselves in.
For example, Butler said citing geek-culture references, Avalon’s filters would keep a player from using the DMC DeLorean from the Back to the Future franchise in a game based on the Star Trek universe.” (Decrypt)
Um. How?
Why can’t a Delorean be in Star Trek? They had a Corvette in the first JJ Abrams movie. What if I am in a Star Trek world and build a BttF Delorean using their tools? Does it suddenly vanish once I finish adding the flux capacitor? If it is “my” Delorean that I am told I own somehow, why can’t I bring it with me from world to world? Is it only mine if I am playing in worlds based on 80s movies?
Well, yeah, probably. I imagine you choose a template when you make a new world. “Cyberpunk”, “80s movies that kid in Ready Player One memorized”, “Space Technowizard”, “That one future property about trekking stars that explicitly demonized VR/AR games and didn’t have a lot of good things to say about virtual worlds either and is a license Cryptic isn’t about to let go of”, and so on. And then creations are tied to worlds with that template.
That thing you bought — on the blockchain. You can’t take it out of the game. You can’t bring it with you in the game. You probably can’t copyright it. In what sense do you really own it?
Also, there’s AI. I guess you’ll be able to integrate that into your NPCs somehow. Lots of people are trying that. I haven’t seen much of anything good come from it, but it’s all blockchain and AI now, so you gotta have it to keep up with the industry buzzword bingo.
I do wish Butler the best and all the luck in the world. There doesn’t seem to be a huge market for UGC-based MMOs, and Roblox is really sucking the oxygen from the others. Lots of them haven’t made the cut.
Just… if you do end up creating content for Avalon, make sure it’s the kind of content you can take with you when you’re done with the game. Only then is it really yours.
In one of my feverish attempts at game development, I stooped so low that I was making a go of it using tools like Core and Crayta. These are like what you describe, without the mysterious slime coating that seems ubiquitous in these blockchain projects.
While both Core and Crayta are still operating, I can’t imagine they’re rolling in cash. They are also walled gardens, and anything made there is stuck there. I think the best a person can hope for is to put their project in front of randos, because based on what I had seen last time I tried either, the results — even from dedicated, talented people — are incredibly sub-par compared to any other actual game whether it’s AAA or indie. Getting friends or targeting a wider audience outside of the platform must be very difficult if not impossible, so projects made in Core or Crayta are literally just preaching to the choir.
Avalon seems like it’s taking that idea and making it 10x worse.
Recently there was Sony’s Dreams, which was filled with people making worlds and very few people playing them.
Roblox proves it can work, though the creators there are still being treated unfairly — lots of stories around that. And scamming is rampant.
The one thing that I, as a creator, still have, is this blog. When WestKarana.com was taken away, I still had all my content on my PC and could put it somewhere else. I really think if you own something you created, you should be able to do the same.
Losing my Foundry work really soured me on, like you put it, walled gardens.
I too am skeptical. Over in Quest VR world they have Meta Horizons that Facebook constantly tries to get users to log into. I dunno how popular it is but when Meta feels it is worth it to pop up “Join 50 others in Jane’s Critter Garden” or something like that, it feels desperate. Or I am just missing something, like that 50 is max number of people in a Horizons world or something.
Roblox almost seems like an anomaly. The exception that proves the rule…whatever that actually means. 🙂
If Horizon Worlds is based on the Roblox model, then the author of Jane’s Critter Garden probably is paying Meta to bring people there. Meta makes its money by charging creators for eyeballs — that’s its entire business model.
If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. The inescapable truth of the modern web.
Am I the only one who wants to play a video game and not have to create my own fun? I have played Eq2 for 16 years now and find my fun is playing a world crafted with clear objectives, questing, raiding ETC. With lots of in game lore.
never been a fan of sandbox MMO’s. Except for Star Wars Galaxies, the crafting and resource gathering in that game was some of the best I have seen.
I believe there are many people who dream of being game developers, if they had good tools to bring their dreams to life. I think that is what Avalon is trying to provide.
The real challenge is finding enough people to play the game that person made. Roblox’s main business, as far as I can tell, is charging developers money to bring players into their games. Their go-to solution for someone who complains their ad dollars aren’t bringing in enough players to pay for the ads is to spend more money on more ads. Maybe hire professional designers to do some really good advertisements. It’s the fault of the developer for not spending enough money.
And if you do strike it big — well, now you have Roblox’s full attention, because now they can get you to continue to spend ever more money, but also the returning players.
I was reading up on Roblox. What they do is so predatory.
Anyway. SW:G was great; I played it until they did the revamp. It was just fun to exist in that world and nobody ever asked me for money. I just ran around and strafed the local wildlife nests and everything was good. I like MMOs that let me just chill and relax.
Your Befallen dungeon was fantastic. I wish I’d played all the others before they vanished but Neverwinter itself isn’t a game I’ve ever felt wholly comfortable with so my visits there have tended to be short.
I do think companies that include these kinds of systems have some degree of responsibility for them that goes beyond just putting them in and taing them out whenever they feel like it. Compare the way Cryptic handled the Forge with the way Daybreak handled Dungeon Maker.
Dungeon Maker was never anything like as sophisticated as the Forge but it let you make your own scenarios and have people play them. The problem was, it quickly became a place people went to exploit the levelling possibilities – a thousand mobs that don’t fight back shoved in a room, basically. That caused issues with the whole game but DBG didn’t pull the entire thing. They tweaked it and messed with it and eventually just switched all the rewards off and left it there.
I made three dungeons. They’re still there. No-one has visited them in years but if I want to go see them and play through them, I can. It’s legacy content that’s not soing anyone any harm and it will most likely sit there until the game closes down. I think that’s the least players could expect. The best would be some means to export the content they’d made to a standalone, offline app but I guess that’s asking too much.
As to the future, I think Jeff Butler’s thing looks awful. Wouldn’t touch it if they were giving it away. Which they’ll probably have to because no-one’s going to pay for it.
I am very optimistic about the possibilities of AI generated rpgs, though. Unlike NFT/Crypto/Blockchain I think a technology that can effectively make games for you from natural language text input (Or maybe even a verbal description, when the speech input arrives.) is very much addressing a desire many gamers have that isn’t being fulfilled already. I probably could learn to make my own games using existing tools but I don’t have the time for that – it would take me years to learn and more years to actually make the game. I am very much more interested in software that can do almost all of it for me if i just type ina few lines of text and I think that will happen.
As for other people playing what I make – nice but not essential. Like my writing, it would be for me to enjoy, first, and to share with others second. Also, it wouldn’t even have to be that good. I mean, a *lot* of MMORPGs I’ve played really weren’t all that good at all and humans made those…
Have you played an AI-generated RPG?
Last year sometime I played one. It was text based, sure. I played it through a few times, and each time, no matter what character I played, it ended with a happy ending where I’d meet my true love and be happy ever after. No matter what the starting point was. It was the only story it knew how to tell. A story where you succeeded in every challenge and got the best reward.
So I decided to make my own, where I would be the DM and it would be the player. It would consistently try to tie up the game and end it because it has no creativity! AI currently can only tell stories that have already been told. I don’t think it is the future. As a tool for a creator — definitely. As a creator — definitely not.