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.