Avalon raises $10M to launch hybrid Web3 MMO

Concept art for Avalon's Aperion.

Image Credit: Avalon

Avalon, an independent game studio working on online games and experiences, said it raise $10 million in a funding round.

The investment will be used to develop their debut eponymous title, Avalon, a next-generation massively multiplayer online game with interoperability of assets and progression between worlds designed for Web2 and Web3 gamer appeal.

Bitkraft Ventures and Hashed co-led the round, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Spartan Capital, Foresight Ventures, LiquidX, and Momentum6.

The Orlando, Florida-based studio was founded in 2021 and includes award-winning leaders from industry-leading studios including Microsoft, Sony, Capcom, Infinity Ward, and Ubisoft. The team has a proven track record of conceiving, developing, shipping, and sustaining triple-A titles across genres, including massively multiplayer online role-playing games, adventure games, and competitive shooters for iconic IPs like EverQuest, Call of Duty, and Assassin’s Creed.

“The Avalon universe prioritizes delivering an immersive gameplay experience by combining cutting-edge tech like Unreal Engine 5 with AI-assisted user-generated content systems. Our focus on a no-code solution enables players to create game logic effortlessly. Plus, our upcoming NFT collection will introduce AI-powered avatar NFTs, adding another layer of innovation,” said Sean Pinnock, CEO of Avalon, in a statement.

Avalon is a massively multiplayer online game designed from the ground up to empower players to create, share, play, and take ownership of their experiences.

“Avalon enables players to build nearly limitless, dense worlds that are high in visual fidelity without having to understand performance constraints, which is the next evolution of UGC,” said Carlos Pereira, partner at Bitkraft Ventures, in a statement. “These individual UGC-centric worlds are in turn united through a central, interoperable gameplay experience. We believe that through vibrant, complex and yet easy-to-build UGC experiences Avalon can make a significant contribution to the rise of the Synthetic Reality, and with it enable experiences with deep economies and high crypto-genre fit.”

In an email to GamesBeat, Pinnock said that investors felt confident in because “we’ve developed several new unique technologies in Avalon that are brand new to gaming and have the ability to drastically shift the way games can be made and played.”

Those include a rapid and nearly limitless building approach through a modular kit system, enhanced by UE’s Nanite and Lumen; several AI-based technologies that will significantly speed up content creation for our player creators and their communities; Inworld AI, which will let devs or players create lifelike NPCs in Avalong; Didimo, which will enable rapid modeling of character and monster variations; and the notion that “creating should feel like playing,” Pinnock said.

As for raising the round, Pinnock said, “It was difficult before 2024. The funding climate was generally very rough at the start of our fundraise.  It wasn’t until the thawing of crypto winter that we saw a lot more movement in Web3.  The demo and technologies we built helped us stand out, which really made this funding round possible.”

Web3 and the metaverse

As for the current unpopularity of the metaverse, Pinnock said, “Buzzwords and trends fluctuate over time. We’ve been fans of the concept of a metaverse since long before the word became ubiquitous. The idea is durable and whoever succeeds in building what it is we’re trying to build will revolutionize the way we engage with technology. Furthermore, games like Roblox and Fortnite Creative represent the closest realization of a metaverse and are highly successful. AVALON aims to create a more mature experience in a similar vein.”

As for Web3, Pinnock said, “Ultimately, blockchain is just a decentralized database. Players and users are generally indifferent to the backend solutions used; they care about whether the application is enjoyable or solves a problem for them. We are committed to developing a fun game, and we strongly believe that digital ownership and decentralization will enhance the user experience, especially in the long term, if demonstrated correctly.”

He added, “These principles are also fundamental to creating a ‘good’ metaverse. One of our primary motivations for developing AVALON is to help decentralize and democratize the internet, which is increasingly controlled by a few large corporations. Web3 based technologies naturally hew in that direction.”

Avalon will be a world that grows with and around players, featuring characters that interact in real-time with players in ways never seen before, made possible through a partnership with artificial intelligence pioneers Didimo (which makes it easy to replicate variations on characters) and Inworld AI (which brings AI to non-player characters, or NPCs).

Players can experience Avalon Core, the main gameplay mode designed by the studio, as well as separate, user-generated worlds and experiences, bringing their heroes, items, and progression across worlds.

“We’re excited to co-lead this investment round for Avalon, a title that will write the next chapter of massively multiplayer online games,” said Baek Kim, general partner at Hashed, in a statement. “The team’s industry-leading experience is immediately evident in the title’s gameplay, graphical fidelity, and creative implementation of technology, economy, and owned content. Avalon has a clear vision for a limitless and cohesive online experience, and we’re excited to see this title come to life.”

Avalon is currently under development for PC and cloud streaming. The game will go into closed early access later this year. To date, the company has raised $23 million, and it has 20 people. With contractors, there are nearly 50 working on Avalon.

The concept art in this story depicts a group of players and AI being led into the “Aperion Arche,” a gateway between realities or worlds in the Avalon universe, Pinnock said.

“It represents the infinite possibilities of a setting agnostic modular massively multiplayer online universe – a game, creator-driven, empowered by AI; a never-ending multiverse of fun,” he said.

The first setting is high-fantasy, and the next will be cyberpunk.

“We have several more themes planned as well. In the future, our users will also have the opportunity to create their own themes,” he said.