Earlier this month, a new independent game development team called AVALON announced its highly ambitious namesake debut project. This MMO game seeks to largely deliver on the concept of the Metaverse as it was enunciated in Ernest Cline's seminal science fiction novel Ready Player One while also pushing the user-generated content trend forward and taking advantage of the latest technological advancements, including two different generative AI tools (Didimo's Popul8 and Inworld AI's Character Engine) that we previously covered on Wccftech.

　　The development team at AVALON is led by Jeffrey Butler, who was a producer on old-school MMORPGs like the original EverQuest and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, as well as a designer on the more recent (canceled) MMO EverQuest Next/Landmark, which also had a strong focus on UGC but never saw the light of day.

　　A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Butler in an hour-long Zoom call about everything AVALON, from the project's inception to its more controversial aspect (the inclusion of blockchain technology). Brace for a long but very interesting conversation.

　　'The ideas for what we're doing today in AVALON were kicked around by us when we were on the development team in 1999 working on EverQuest as a potential next step.'How did you connect with Sean Pinnock to create this new company?

　　That's a great question. One of my old employees is working on an independent game, and he's also a popular streamer, discussing the state of the games industry and the quality of the games that he's been playing recently,

　　But he also does interviews with people that he's worked with over the years and he reached out to me. It was like the anniversary of EverQuest, so he wanted to do an EverQuest-themed interview. Our discussion ended up going on for three hours. We were on camera interviewing, and we had this massive, three-hour EverQuest discussion. About a year later, Sean Pinnock ran across it. He discovered it because he was looking up information related to EverQuest Next and Landmark due to it being a user-generated content-focused game.

　　As he was watching the interview, he realized that he and I shared a vision for the future of gaming. So, he reached out to me on LinkedIn and set up a discussion. It was kind of out of the blue, but he was a game maker and I liked his website and the games he had worked on, so I said, sure, let's sit down and talk.

　　He pitched me a game, and in the middle of the pitch, I held up my hand and I was like, hold on, let me finish the pitch for you. He looked at me and I started talking.

　　He was like, are you doing due diligence for one of our investors? Do you have our documents? And I said, no, man, that's just the game I want to make. It was an example of parallel thought where he, independent of myself, had effectively thought up an idea for building the same game.

　　Amazingly enough, we immediately hit it off not only over that subject but really over the sort of creative direction that we both shared. We agreed to collaborate, stood up the company, and got investors involved very quickly. I'm amazed to say, because creative differences are really a thing, that two years later almost to the day, we remain just that aligned, if not even more.

　　We've literally never had a fundamental disagreement on the direction of AVALON, which is very gratifying. The idea of a metaverse is clearly out there, but there aren't many people who are making a concerted effort to make it happen. However, some people are creating pieces of it, individual sections of technology that belong in a metaverse.

　　Quite honestly, I feel that our opportunity here isn't merely to make a company, name it AVALON, and start working on a piece of entertainment software intended to be a metaverse. It's going to be based on our ability to gather technology partners who are working on those fundamental pieces that belong in what you might describe as a metaverse. We're not approaching the point where full immersion VR is around the corner. But everything else about a metaverse is around the corner or already here.

　　Metaverse has certainly been something of a buzzword in the industry for the past couple of years.

　　Yeah, almost to the point where it's a bad word. We've kind of backed off of the constant use of that word because it's turned negative.

　　You said it's been two years since you founded AVALON, right? Can you share roughly how large it is in terms of number of employees?

　　We've got about 25 internal employees and a bunch of contractors. At times, that many more contractors working on the project. We ramped up over those two years.

　　Do you feel confident that you can complete the project with this amount, or are you going to hire more people?

　　We are currently a modestly resourced, talented team. We will be able to reach the market on a team this size. However, throughout our development, it is our goal and intention to grow the team size as opportunity permits. We have a go-to-market strategy that fits in very well with our current team size.

　　It will be more focused on the ability to create content, and we'll ship with a smaller but robust massive multiplayer-style body of content, storyline, and setting to use as templates for continued building in the world.

　　'Drawing from D&D, what's currently missing in WoW, FFXIV, and all these other MMOs? You, the player, can do absolutely nothing to change or to shape the world. And it's missing in such a glaring manner that one wonders how it could be the case after 25 years.'You've described AVALON as a metaverse of sorts. Do you think that traditional MMO fans are going to like it?

　　I think that traditional MMO fans will like it quite a bit. Think about EverQuest or Ultima Online. Every fantasy MMO that's followed those two games has effectively been a version of Dungeons & Dragons online in a shared, persistent world. Whereas in 1997, if we wanted to play a game of D&D, we had to gather our friends together on a Friday night, subject to all the difficulties of doing so, the thing that Ultima Online and EverQuest did for us was they allowed us to get together and effectively play a D&D-style game in this shared online world.

　　It was an incredibly intoxicating advancement. I got to be friends with Dave Arnason as a result of EverQuest. I showed up at Dragon Con one year and walked into a giant hall where he and Ryan Dancy from Wizards of the Coast were doing a panel. I was standing in the back of the room and Dave Arneson stood up and pointed.

　　He said, hey, you with the EverQuest shirt on, did you have anything to do with that game? And I was like, yeah, I'm the producer. He said, come up here, please. He asked me to join the panel. We got to be friends and at some point he simply said, why didn't you name it D&D? And I told him, well, we talked to Wizards of the Coast at the time, but they didn't know what we were talking about.

　　Back then, it was an incredibly revolutionary idea, and revolutionary ideas are weak. People don't respond to them. They don't understand what it is you're talking about. So, when you talk about pushing massively multiplayer games beyond that, it's also something that confuses or frightens people. They're like, why would anyone want that? We've already got what we need.

　　I can say we don't have what we need because the ideas for what it is we're doing today in AVALON were kicked around by us when we were on the development team in 1999 working on EverQuest as a potential next step, as a direction that we could take our franchise and our products. EverQuest Next and Landmark were just examples of that sort of thought.

　　Again, drawing from Dungeons and Dragons, what's currently missing in World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV and all these other MMOs? You, the player, can do absolutely nothing to change or to shape the world. And it's missing in such a glaring manner that one wonders how it could be the case after 25 years. I know why EverQuest Next/Landmark didn't launch: the company was purchased by another and they canceled all ongoing development, so you never got to see what it could have been. But it shocks me that no other company has managed to make a success.

　　There have been a few companies that made a run at it, but their attempt was so half-hearted, and it didn't involve actual content generation. It was simply, here's an editor and a tool for you to slap together pieces of a world that requires you to know as much about game development as the game developers themselves and doesn't give you any power to reward the players, as is necessary for any form of entertaining experience.

　　The Star Trek Online Foundry, for instance, where you could create a game world but not give out any rewards. I've been one of Star Trek Online's highly avid players. In fact, I wrote the first design document for Star Trek Online in 1999, and I've been involved in one way or another with that game as a creator or a player since I was working on EverQuest. But when they stood up their user-generated content tool, the Foundry, you couldn't actually give out rewards. You couldn't be a dungeon master.

　　Looping back to the idea, we intend to create incredibly entertaining content that's solid, sets the bar, and allows our players to author their own content. They can place their content in our world, in AVALON Core, using our rules and all the constraints that we place on balance and game design, so you can't put a Tier 10 sword on a Tier 5 monster.

　　If you pull that monster's stats toward the right and make it more difficult, you'll change the monster's tier, eventually making it more difficult, changing the loot that would drop on it, etc. You won't be able to put a high-tier monster in a low-tier dungeon or vice versa, and when those monsters are killed, they will grant an amount of experience that is predetermined based on their tier and difficulty, the loot they have, etc; all within constraints.

　　Or, you can author content outside of constraints. It's just that the rewards that come from that content won't be able to come back into AVALON Core without being empowered by resources that come from AVALON Core and drop in accordance with our rules.

　　I've got a few questions there already. The first one is about AVALON Core. I'm guessing that's your game content within this metaverse, right?

　　AVALON Core is our rule set and our world within the broader metaverse of worlds that extend from it and are connected to it and use the same rule set and worlds that just throw the rule set out the door.

　　For example, someone might create a reverse tower defense dungeon with Super Smash Bros. mechanics and have no connection whatsoever to AVALON Core and no persistence of items.

　　Does AVALON Core have its own storyline and quests?

　　Are you at all familiar with Sword Art Online?

　　I've never read it, but I know of it.

　　I generally point to Sword Art Online. We aren't talking much yet about the storyline and the setting, but I can tell you that this first release of the world is a trial for players. There's something much larger going on in the AVALON world setting. As the game begins, the players are effectively going through a series of trials, a proving ground, as it were. Our environment is set up as a single iteration.

　　And in the center of the iteration is a tall tower, a system of dungeon levels that one ascends to reach the top. When you look up in the sky, you can see a crack. On the other side of that fissure appears to be another world that the tower goes up to. As you complete the trial in that starting zone, you move on to the next, more difficult zone, and these zones are stacked effectively on top of one another.

　　Access through the tower, and you progress into increasing levels of difficulty and different worlds. And when I say different worlds, I mean that literally. You may go from a fantasy world to a cyberpunk world, a science fiction world, or a post-apocalyptic world.

　　It is a cross-genre game at launch. You could have an assault rifle, or you could have a crossbow. The mechanics work similarly. You could have a mono-molecular katana, or you could have a magical broadsword.

　　Basically, it is a series of trials where you can progress world from world, right? Is there an end goal you have in mind for the players at launch, or is it still going to be the progression loop that players are familiar with since EverQuest?

　　I would say our endgame for launch is the acquisition of additional power and pursuit of ever more difficult content and the gear and rewards that come with it. That said, there is also the effective power of user generated content. While I don't expect the vast majority of people to engage in the authorship of content (if it's as large as 5%, that would be great), the power of user generated content is available to everyone in the game.

　　It's not simply a matter of being a dungeon master and creating dungeons and tweaking the AI of NPCs and personalities and building villages. It's the possibility of gathering together, either in small groups or guilds or larger structures, and building or adding to sections of the world or having your own section of the world itself.

　　You could be building out these villages, decorating them, building out the castle behind me and the dungeon underneath it, or just decorating your own house, either in AVALON Core or an analogous world. In the cyberpunk world, you could have an apartment in a skyscraper. You can own your own business and maintain it inside the game world. If you're a crafter or harvester, you could market your products through your own business,

　　As an avid MMO player, there needs to be a confluence for all these things we see in existing games, and we see only thumbnails of them. That's our focus for merging user generated content with the sort of building, guild housing, and such things we've seen in other games.

　　'It's not simply a matter of being a DM and creating dungeons, tweaking the AI of NPCs and personalities and building villages. It's the possibility of gathering together, either in small groups or guilds or larger structures, and building or adding to sections of the world or having your own section of the world itself.'One of the issues that comes to mind right away is that people could potentially create easy content and then take those resources back into AVALON Core. That would create an imbalance.

　　If we allowed them, within the first five minutes of opportunity, people would create piles of gold and the highest quality resources and drop them in their iteration and allow them to be carried back to AVALON Core, and so we won't let them do that. They can't do that. They can create resources in their own worlds and their own worlds would automatically generate resources, but if they don't use the AVALON Core ruleset, that constrains the balance of the game.

　　For instance, let's say you create a village in your world. If the village and the terrain that it sits on is all flagged for tier three, then the appropriate tier three monsters would randomly spawn there.

　　The resources that a Tier three monster should drop would be available to them so you could get the loot as you would expect from Tier three monsters. Because that set of rewards is compatible with AVALON Core, you could move back and forth between those iterations. Think of this village as an extension of AVALON Core. It has been blessed and balanced, as it were, by game developers.

　　It's not possible in the AVALON Core rulesets to give out rewards that don't belong in the setting or aren't properly balanced. Of course, this is a goal, not a guarantee. People will try to break it; that is the nature of user generated content. The very first thing that people try to do is try to build a workaround or a simple means of acquiring your rewards for zero or minimal effort.

　　That's key amongst the balance mechanisms that we have to prevent. We want people to be able to craft their own loot. I want people to be able to make a magic sword, but I don't want people to be able to give that magic sword to themselves and their buddies with no effort involved. They will not be able to bring these goods back to AVALON Core under any circumstances with no effort involved.

　　Maybe you want to make Excalibur, the sword that makes you king of all the Britons when you possess it, because you want your own iteration of Camelot and you want to be King Arthur. Congratulations. I encourage you to tell that story, but don't think that you're coming back to AVALON Core with Excalibur and being king of all the Britons. Sorry.

　　Quite frankly, Camelot might be even bigger after a period of time, for example. But Excalibur brought into AVALON Core won't be the same sword that it was in the world that it came from.

　　If it did come from an AVALON Core world, it would be content that you had to, for instance, kill a very high level dragon to have an opportunity to have it drop. If it showed up in Avalon Core, I would be certain that whoever had earned it in one of the connected worlds had gone to a great deal of effort to acquire it.

　　The other thing that's incredibly important to understand is all the tools that I'm talking about are accessed through the game. You log into AVALON Core, and even if you go into creative mode, you're still in the game. You don't leave the game and go to an editor. You don't need to be a game developer to modify these things. All you need to be is a game player.

　　Maybe you grab a monster and go to a crafting station, throw it there and alter its stats. You'll take it over to the brain machine and alter its personality and how its AI behaves, change it to be friendly, at which point in time it wouldn't be a monster any longer. It would just be an NPC in the world. Whatever fits within your story or can be allowed within the AVALON Core story, all within the game.

　　We feel the idea that you would have to be a game developer to author content needed to go away. It's difficult to make games. We can't expect people to create content in our game if they have to become a game developer.

　　We work with Richard Hinckley, who is one of the very early employees at Epic. He was one of the architects of Verse, the scripting language in Unreal Creative. In his interview process, as we were talking and trying to recruit him to come work on AVALON, we laid out our vision for how content would be authored in our game. We talked about the Verse, we talked about the Unreal Editor and how we were focused on effectively flipping the capabilities of the editor into the game world. He was so excited with that idea that he decided to join our team.

　　These ideas are based on the work that we did going all the way back to EverQuest, but most particularly in Landmark and Next, where we began the process of standing up a game focused around user generated content. I have been working on the precepts and the restrictions and the balance mechanisms to manage balanced but empowered user generated content for more than ten years. Trust me; it's going to take that amount of effort to give people a dungeon master's power and yet maintain a game where if you see someone with a powerful weapon, you have an assurance that they earned it.

　　I'm guessing for the end user, it might look similar to the Unreal Editor for Fortnite, correct?

　　The functionality of an editor, but only as it relates to a game. In other words, think of the survival games that you've played where you can build, like Valheim, so attach that sort of direction.

　　In terms of content authorship, you'll be able to place monsters, build up dungeons, all along that direction within the game using modular pieces that, like Legos, snap together. That's how you will be a dungeon master. You'll snap dungeons together. You'll grab prefabricated dungeons from us and other players.

　　You can build a dungeon in a cave, similar to Diablo, where you're wandering through caverns and corridors. You can build dungeon pieces that are enclosed with actual hallways and rooms that you go into. You can combo those things together.

　　You can build on the content we create and build on the content that your fellow community members have given you permission to take and build upon. And you can create your own content or any combination of those things.

　　Could you create entirely new art and/or character models?

　　It's our goal. Fortunately, we're using Unreal technology. We have an extremely robust generative AI character creator, so you will be able to create your own humanoid NPC models. Your own elves, aliens, ghouls, zombies. In our character creator, just like you author your avatar when you build your character to enter the game, you'll be able to build your NPCs, currently our humanoid NPCs, which we plan to extend to quadrupeds and other forms of monsters. We're working throughout the development cycle to extend that generative AI capability and customizability to quadrupeds and other monsters.

　　To be clear, the customization is like building an avatar in a game like Black Desert Online, but once you've constructed a template for an avatar, you hit a button and generate 100 different varieties of the particular creature you just created.

　　If you wanted a village to be populated with tieflings, you could build a tiefling template for male and female, tweak their characteristics and then hit randomised and generate a hundred variations on that character.

　　Take them all. Build their NPC personalities out through, again, generative AI. We're partnered with Inworld AI, where you can build conversational and interactive AI models and then drop them into the game world.

　　I was going to ask about that. One of the main things that sparked my interest in AVALON is its usage of cutting-edge generative AI tools. I've interviewed the CEO of Didimo and extensively covered Inworld AI implementations, so I'm familiar with the technologies.

　　Ultimately, I think what generative AI gives us is it breaks the blank canvas paralysis. The idea of having to create 100 NPCs to fill a village.

　　I know how long it would take us. As game developers, using the Unreal editor and a proprietary tool and a database it would take us more than a month to make really good characters that all had unique dialogue and sort of personality and feel. That's not even talking about how long it would take to record all the voiceover, right? We'd be at it forever. It would take months to populate just one village.

　　'Inworld AI is a transformative experience. It's almost indistinguishable from interacting with a real fictional character.'Inworld AI is particularly interesting. As I'm sure you're aware, there have been a few mods powered by their technology, and recently, they announced a partnership with Xbox. They're going to create an AI toolset for game developers.

　　I can tell you that I've got Inworld AI NPCs in my game that are using it right now. It's quite impressive to walk up to an NPC and be able to have a conversation. When we first started working with Inworld AI, they said, we'll give you X number of credits to power the NPCs as an integration test.

　　Even with a relatively small team, my employees ran out of my Inworld AI credits just by talking to the NPCs we placed in the game, filming videos of the interactions, and posting them to the team.

　　I went to do a demo and I was like, why won't you talk to me? I realized that she was out of credits because I was in the development mode of Inworld AI, and all I was working on was this tiny little experimental body of credits, which were considered amazingly generous, but my employees had spent them all interacting with the NPCs because they were so knowledgeable about our world that we had people who wanted to know about the lore of AVALON.

　　Rather than read our documents, they would go talk to the Inworld AI NPCs in the game, ask them funny questions, and see what they would say in response. That's one thing that is and has been absolutely amazing. But that's not where Inworld AI is going to be cool. Where it's going to be cool is every single NPC in the world, including the ones that hate you, are real and they talk the entire time.

　　If the content author wants them to, they listen to your microphone. We've got a giant mech in the game named Nikki, and there's no way to be her ally. We currently locked out the dialogue and ability to shift her emotions to non-aggro. We did that for demo purposes, but if we unlocked it, you would literally be able to sweet-talk her into being a friend rather than trying to stomp on you and blow you up with her miniguns and rockets in the game.

　　While you're running around trying to avoid getting killed by her and shooting her when opportunity permits, trying to get her out of your way so that you can get into the skyscraper behind her, she will shit talk you the entire time. As you're screaming to your friends for help, she's interacting with you the entire time.

　　It is a transformative experience. It's almost indistinguishable from interacting with a real fictional character. If you were talking to the dragon, you better say the right thing, or you're dead. There are NPCs that you can't beat at your level. When Bilbo walked into Smaug's lair, he couldn't even come close to killing the dragon, right?

　　These experiences have literally never happened in games. Now, don't get me wrong. They can say the lines that you want them to say. All of the power that exists in the world right now of crafting an experience where you want the dragon to read out a script, that's there, as it always has been going back to pen and paper games. We can write down what the dragon is going to say.

　　It's the same thing in massively multiplayer games. The difference is we can also give the dragon a link to 14 Wiki pages that reference the history of dragons, the history of the world, etc. To take a page from Tolkien, the dragon knows what happened in the Silmarillion because that's when it was born. It was hatched by Morgoth, et cetera, et cetera. The dragon knows everything that's ever done in its entire life, it knows a significant amount of the history of the world.

　　It has behaviors and knowledge, all of which, if you can flatter it long enough that it won't aggro on you and chew you up, you can gain information from it. You can unlock quests. You can learn about the world in a way that players have never been able to do up until this point.

　　I agree. This kind of technology has the potential to be truly transformative for RPGs.

　　Inworld AI also works for NPCs that can't talk. You could have an intelligent car with an AI programmed, and it doesn't need to speak. How you treat it determines how it reacts to you. The same is true of your pet hawk. Maybe you're a ranger with a pet, intelligent but nonverbal. That's your familiar, your companion.

　　The idea of a Tamagotchi, that's right out the door. The Tamagotchi we're talking about now might as well be alive because the degree to which it's close is uncanny. The idea that you will have an abiding relationship with a fictional character, ala Holodeck, that's here.

　　That's why I say, ten years ago, could there be a metaverse? No, period. There's no argument that there was no technology to make a fictional metaverse, such as we've read about, feel and look real. Today, it is possible, and people will be blown away by it.

　　I do have a question about the Inworld AI credits. How is that going to work in AVALON? Let's say that a specific world created by someone becomes particularly popular...

　　That particular situation was just during the very brief evaluation period when we first started using Inworld AI. Our business model for Inworld remains to be seen, but our technology partners are very open to workable business models that function as we will need them to be able to support a massively multiplayer game.

　　We're not ready to announce how it will work, so you won't have to worry about paying credits to be able to talk to the NPCs. We can't have our players having to worry about how many credits they have to be able to interact with NPCs in the world. You walk up to the dragon and the dragon is like, insert another quarter for me to talk to you. I'm happy to kill you, but if you want to talk to me, please insert another quarter. It's got to be seamless. It's got to be something you don't think about. I need to be able to empower the characters in my village without having to worry about how much money it's gonna cost me.

　　You've mentioned D&D as a big inspiration for AVALON, correct?

　　All pen and paper games, really. I tease Sean that I have Dungeons and Dragons character sheets that are literally older than he is. I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons since 1976 every weekend. I play a pen and paper game with the very first woman to ever play a game of D&D. She was friends with Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

　　She lived in the same town and she was dating a guy who told her about going into this basement at the Historical Miniature Society and playing this crazy game where they were in a dungeon killing monsters and orcs and stuff. At first, I was kind of skeptical about her story. Then I found a module that Gary Gygax had published, Bottle City, and her character was in that module. It was crazy.

　　Could you potentially act as a proper Dungeon Master in AVALON, adjusting things in real-time, etc.?

　　It is my goal that a dungeon master will actually be able to enter the monsters themselves and play them. I want to empower experiences where, for instance, you could build a reverse dungeon where you or a group of people play the monsters and NPC adventurers come and assault your dungeon. Why not? If we can give people the ability to author content, why not let them inhabit the monsters? You could be the dragon in the dungeon, for once.

　　Do you have a player cap in mind for AVALON?

　　We'll push our technology as far as possible. At this point, Unreal is hard at work using technology like Iris to boost the number of people that can be active in any Unreal-powered zone.

　　I'm assuming a minimum of 120 people. I want to get that number higher, but I'll be satisfied and I can certainly ship a functional game with the ability for 120 players active in a zone. That's a workable size. Still, Unreal is working on it. There's some other excellent technology sources that are also working on it who we're talking to. It's newer stuff, it's not like SpatialOS.

　　But I fall back to that adage that I used to begin with. The metaverse is not going to be the creation of one company. It's gonna be the creation of several companies. The technology from the best sources, all gathered together in one place. Inworld AI, Didimo's Popul8 character technology, a networking technology from a separate provider, and a backend that goes along with it.

　　The only reason I can give this to you is Nanite, because you can take one of those buildings, template it and place it in the world ten times and the frame rate doesn't budge when it's placing the object. I can take a skyscraper that's a kilometer and a half tall, pop it into the world and the frame rate doesn't budge. I can pop it in the world 100 times, and there's no frame rate hit. I've shown that to people who have been in the games industry for 35 years, and they've literally been like, you've got to be kidding me.

　　I can build a complex bridge that would take me from the village to the castle. I can build it through the sky while my buddies are running down the bridge. I can beat them to the castle with the placement of the bridge sections, and there's not even a detectable hitch. We've played games where someone casts a spell and everyone on the screen hitches, right?

　　You don't need to worry about any of that stuff because of Nanite. That's one of the reasons why a metaverse can exist today. I can give you the ability to author a village and not give you a limit on how many buildings you can place before your frame rate drops through the floor.

　　I'm not gonna exaggerate. I haven't been able to find the number of buildings in a scene yet that caused the frame rate to drop. I took a wall section and replicated it in a scene like a trillion times and still had 30 FPS.

　　'Gold is worth money. It always has been. It doesn't matter if you like it or you don't like it. It is a fact. In this case, I am simply saying it belongs to you. Nothing more, nothing less. It's yours. Give it to your grandson. Give it to your wife. Throw it away. You can give a shit that it's worth money, or you can give no shits that it's worth money. It will not change the game.'I'd like to talk to you for another 10 hours, but time is running short, and I have a big question left to ask. You probably see where this is going. Gamers have shown a very strong reluctance and even disdain for blockchain technology. I understand AVALON will implement that. Is it correct? If so, how do you plan on making it palatable? Usually, the first reaction as soon as people read about blockchain in a game, even if they are otherwise interested, they are immediately turned off.

　　This is a very large answer and unfortunately, it's not an answer that we have time for. However, I'll say this. In 1999, while working on EverQuest, I made a very strong internal push to support digital ownership in our game. I don't care about blockchain. I'm not a crypto bro or whatever you wanna call it. I don't have a huge store of Bitcoin in my back pocket.

　　I want one thing as a Web 2.0-style game developer and one thing only: digital ownership. I refuse to let companies own what I earn in their games. Right now, there's a $2 billion black market in illicit transactions related to online games. It's insanity. It always has been. There were items in EverQuest back in the day that were worth well in excess of $500 apiece. Those items were traded. They were bought and sold. They have been then and they are now. I have a flask in Path of Exile that fairly recently was valued at $23,000.

　　The point is none of those goods are owned by the people who earned them. If I want to trade them to you, I'm not allowed to in accordance with the terms of service of those games.

　　Come on. If you go to Chevrolet today and buy a pickup truck for 40 grand, what would you say if Chevrolet said 'oh, no, you can't sell the thing that you've just acquired'? Just look at Ready Player One when Parzival buys the Holy Hand Grenade. It's right there in the fiction. We don't need the Sonys or the Square Enixs of the world owning the stuff we earn in their games.

　　The other side of the argument tends to be, well, what about greed? What about the companies selling us stuff? Look, we're building a game that is no different than the games we've built in the past.

　　Yes, there will be value in the items that drop in the game, and that value will be determined by the players. And we will not make the Diablo 3 auction house mistake where we ratchet down the influx of items in the game to push people into our real money auction house so that we can steal a cut of the money.

　　That is the crux of people's concern. It's an entirely valid concern. I plan on building an incredibly entertaining experience, and whether or not you are interested in selling the goods that you acquire in the game is of no more concern to you than it is should you be playing World of Warcraft today. Gold is worth money. It doesn't matter if you like it or you don't like it.

　　It is worth money. It always has been. It is a fact. In this case, I am simply saying it belongs to you. Nothing more, nothing less. It's yours. Give it to your grandson. Give it to your wife. Throw it away. You can give a shit that it's worth money, or you can give no shits that it's worth money. It will not change the game. We will not balance AVALON around the fact that gold is worth money any more than we have ever balanced our games around that fact. That's the short response.

　　Just a quick follow-up. What about the user-generated content? Let's say that I've created a particularly interesting world. Is that also going to be valuable in digital terms?

　　It could very well be. It's a balance mechanism. The simple answer is it won't be possible for digital goods to mix with the AVALON Core stuff unless it's in accordance with the AVALON Core rules. But it is possible that digital goods outside of our ruleset would become valuable.

　　It would be expected, actually. Look at Dota, right? If something like that springs up and I'm sure it will in a future metaverse and those things will have value. In that case, their creators and the people who transact in those digital goods, it will again belong to them, not me.

　　Should they choose to exchange those goods, it will be with our blessing, not our interference. You won't get banned for doing it. That's simply it. Nothing less, nothing more.

　　Where would you say you are in the development stage of AVALON?

　　We're not necessarily going into great depth right now about our roadmap, but we're a year out from an Alpha in all likelihood, and sometime beyond will be our first playable launch. In about a year, people should be able to author content alongside us in Alpha.

　　In terms of platforms, are you targeting just PC, or do you have console and/or mobile in mind as well?

　　PC and any interface that can access the Web. Right now, we can stream the game, but it won't be free because streaming costs money. I can already play it right now on my phone.

　　Thank you for your time.