The RaidGuild DAO is a network of developers that has collectively provided services to companies and protocols for over 5 years. Starting as the world's first DevShop DAO in 2019, it's weathered the many ups and downs of the web3 ecosystem. Along the way, we've worked with over 150 clients, shipped over 200 projects, and grown to over 140 members. But we've stuck primarily with building products for others.

Today, we announce our first "venture" as a DAO: RaidGuild Forge. A venture for RaidGuild is a concentrated experiment in a particular sector to see if it can add value, and ultimately, a full product. For Forge, we will focus on niche mini-games and go through 3 stylized phases over the next 6 months (from June to December, 2025).You've

1. Prospecting: early public launches of mini-game experiments

2. Mining: fast iteration on experiments that have traction

3. Ore Processing: building out a mini-game with traction into a full game

Of course, if the venture ever loses steam it could wind down at any of these phases.

The Forge Venture is spinning up specifically to prospect the area of Digital Physics (or Autonomous Worlds) in web3 games. A handful of studios have investigated these grounds before: particularly, Dust (formerly Biomes) and CCP Games with EVE Frontier are exploring them. However, Forge will specifically focus on patent-royalty stacking in games with Digital Physics. Our prospecting will focus on building experimental mini-games with 4 core mechanics.

1. Patented Components: engineered parts that can be used in the machines of assemblers; requires low-level skills

2. Patented Machines: structures that are assembled as one of the core items of multiplayer battles; requires mid-level skills

3. Multi-player Battles: contests between players using assembled machines; requires high-level skills

4. Royalty Splits: rewards that go to the winner of a battle, as well as both the assemblers of machines and engineers of components that were used to win the battle

While the patent-royalty mechanics will remain relatively fixed between mini-games, the battle types will differ for each release. For instance, our first mini-game will center around 2D Tower Defense battles, but future games could center around RoboCup, kart racing, or even FPS games (the respective machines being robot fighters, karts, and weapons).

To illustrate this further, let's take the example of a kart racing mini-game, where our 4 mechanics form 3 player personas.

1. The Battler: the player driving the pre-assembled karts in races

2. The Assembler: the player who builds unique karts using pre-engineered components

3. The Engineer: the player who creates and optimizes components (like wheels, frames, and engines) based on the constraints of the game's digital physics

Players can focus on 1 persona, or dabble with all 3. Our goal will be to find an initial battle style that's both fun and easily illustrates these 3 personas and underlying patent-royalty system.

To keep as much on-chain as possible, we'll be building all initial mini-games on MUD and deploying on Redstone, which allows for extremely cheap transactions and eventually 7ms latency through Quarry. However, for in-game payments--in order to start the flow of royalties--we will be using Base USDC, given how easy it is for users to purchase.

Because of high gas costs and slow block speeds many of these games are forced to move most of the data off-chain, reducing them to somewhat unsophisticated and overly traditional versions of what they could be. While web3 games have improved quite a bit in the last few years, they are still not far off from the flash games of 20 years ago (think addictinggames.com circa 2008). At the same time, high-quality web2 games are continuing to dabble with web3 features, but generally not beyond introducing NFTs into already existing franchises. There has been a strong increase in web3 games released in the last couple years, but clearly there are plenty of areas that are untapped.

As is no surprise, we believe the real magic of web3 games comes when most of the data is on-chain and Digital Physics is built into it from the beginning. While traditional games focus on 1 type of player (The Battler), our games will focus on 3 types of players: The Battler, The Assembler, and The Engineer. Each plays a role in driving what's possible in the game and even changing the meta for the entire player base. A new component is introduced that changes what assemblers use, a new machine is introduced that changes the strategy of battlers, or a new battle style changes what components and machines are most in demand. Once a fair patent-royalty framework is solidified, it will be exciting to see this dynamic applied to many different genres.

Since the beginning, RaidGuild has straddled the world of role-playing and work. In our DAO, each contract is a raid, our main meeting is a RoundTable, and every internal role has an associated class (e.g., solidity engineers are wizards). Thus, building games that straddle these worlds is a natural inclination. RaidGuild's very existence illustrates the power of pseudonymous players around the world voluntarily coming together to make a living through role-play. RaidGuild Forge is an attempt to make this possible for those beyond our 140 member base.

What we've always lacked, though, is an automated way of attributing value and distributing rewards based on it. Numerous projects have tried to crack this nut: SourceCred notably tried until it dissolved in 2022, and Tea Protocol is attempting to do it now for open source software. Building out a patent-royalty system for Autonomous Worlds is perhaps another attempt at doing this, albeit narrowly focused. But if successful, it will not only change what players come to expect from their games, but potentially what sovereign workers expect for making a living.