GameDAO is the community owned Operating System for video games, metaverses, esports and the creative industry. Join us in creating the best financial and organisational primitives for true community ownership, collaboration and interoperable economies, teleporting the entire $165bn global game industry into web3 and beyond.

Like in many other industries, working at the forefront of innovation to build commercially successful or sustainable creative work is hard and expensive. This is also true for video games, creative content and even for the growing community of eSports.

For game developers and creatives, it is therefore a constant challenge to raise money and generate a steady income while creating games which are loved by their audience. Every time they start a new project, creators either make a lot of sacrifice until they complete a convincing prototype or they have to sell upfront to a publisher willing to support the idea in order to get a solid funding to afford the development. This is especially true if you are a small studio, while bigger studios might get support by their banks or other providers, which obviously comes at a cost.

The main problem they face is, that development and creative work requires freedom of creative expression for a pretty demanding audience, which is hard to maintain while you struggle and run after money — which leads to sub optimal game and business models, as transaction oriented funnels usually lead to better returns.

Today, one of their best options is to find a publisher, but of course, they are selling a decent amount of their intellectual property for a finance round giving them hardly enough air until some months after release. With increased cost and more competition in the market, the problem will only get worse over time.

Since many decades the global video games industry represents the avant garde in many disciplines like computer science, creative software and graphics, intelligent systems, squeezing the last bits and render cycles out of existing hardware, no matter if it was an ATARI 2600, a Commodore Amiga, a current state of the art gaming console or multi GPU Desktop PC built for the latest immersive piece of art.

If only there was an easier and more affordable way to connect studios with gamers, without all the middle men, then game creators could focus on what they do best: Creating video games and maybe even more sustainable business models, which would lead to happy times for developers and gamers, which could directly influence better video games — all of them in a mutually beneficial relationship.

On the other hand, there are established solutions to offer early stage products: Platforms like Kickstarter, Itch or Steam provide presale mechanics for upcoming projects. While this is tempting, somehow it rarely leads to good and finished products, therefore teams risk reputation and gamers willing to invest upfront their hard earned credits.

With millions of game creators and billions of gamers as potential investors in this market, there is a clear opportunity to meaningfully impact a huge number of people.

A different Solution

GameDAO is creating a unique setup to satisfy the needs of game creators, publishers, gamers and people seeking to invest in the gaming, creative and esports industries.

GameDAO’s approach here is, to set up a cooperative, a truly democratic organisation by heart, which is governed through a DAO. Therefore GameDAO is a DAC: Decentralised Autonomous Cooperative, owned and run by the community.

GameDAO utilises this construct to attract stakeholders from above mentioned areas, which look for early market proof and want to integrate the community in governance of e.g. the company creating the product, the actual product creation or simply the way funds are released to the beneficiary, eventually giving all parties a transparent environment to interact.

This improves traditional community / investor based fundraising mechanics manifold, as not only the market proof happens early, but teams get support by a massive community which can influence along the process and have sometimes intrinsic but mostly gamified incentive to be loyal and support the product.

To achieve this, GameDAO creates open protocols and a DApp, a decentralised application, running on networks which provide all required protocols and safeguards to create robust economies for creative industries.+++

Abstract

GameDAO Protocol is an experimental decentralised protocol for fundraising, coordination and ownership of video games. It is developed by GameDAO AG, a research and development company, based in Liechtenstein, with contributors around the world.

GameDAO is built with substrate, a cutting edge blockchain SDK by Parity, with interoperability, scalability, robustness and security in mind. GameDAO is originally developed on zero.io, a substrate based interoperable multichain for video games (under development), but aiming for a public launch of the first version on acala.network, which is a cutting edge Parachain in both Kusama and Polkadot, also providing a big community and a variety of protocol primitives complementing GameDAO’s efforts in a scalable fashion.

Primitives for open markets

GameDAO Protocol provides primitives for invocation and operation of decentralised autonomous organisations (Creator DAOs), utilisation of decentralised finance (DeFi / GameFi / MetaFi) instruments for fundraising and non-fungible token (NFT) to provide a comprehensive solution for license management, game related loot drops and gamified governance functionality. The protocol is designed and operated in an open and decentralised fashion, enabling programmatic access to everyone.

GameDAO AG also develops the decentralised application (DApp) frontend accessible through https://gamedao.co, and others, to enable non technical users to utilise these protocols with some additional safeguards, making them usable in a reasonable, secure and compliant way.

Community owned by design

_The protocols and application assemble to a low barrier, community governed fundraising platform to involve funding contributors in project coordination and increase mutual trust_based on shared interests and enhanced transparency. This allows market proof at early stage and loyalty through ownership.

This shall contribute to the individual freedom of the community and the creation of more sustainable business models of video games and cyberspace in general.

The Art of GameDAO

The gaming industry is facing several challenges, such as:

Gamers cannot participate in game creation, investment or financing in a seamless way. Also, creators are struggling to build up and integrate the community deeply and to pre-finance new games. Life Cycles of games shortened, budgets skyrocketed into seven to eight digits easily and competition is growing – with these, the risk increases.

The goal of GameDAO is to provide simple, yet comprehensive answers to these challenges. During the last couple of years, the sample size in regards to democratisation and decentralisation of organisations and financial protocols in web3 massively increased, already exceeding annual revenue in the global game market. Also the amount of video games based on community curation and coordination and even adoption of NFTs increases at scale (Epic Games, UBI Soft, EA). Finally, a variety of barriers, like banning of crypto assets, effectively block innovation and lock traditional games in centralised silos and walled gardens.

This leads to our thesis to challenge the current state of the industry through democratisation and participation by using standardised protocols for video games.

Democracy is hard, therefore continuous incentive needs to be in place to enable communities in a gamified fashion, e.g. through NFT based collectables. Flexible finance instruments for fundraising complete the solution, all together delivering early marketproof and community buy-in in a collaborative way.

How will GameDAO achieve its goal?

GameDAO itself is a community coordinated DAO, featuring memberships and governance, aligning on common goals, e.g. how to utilise its treasury, through its access and governance token $GAME.

GameDAO allows creators of video games, and everything related, to launch their own Creator DAOs, building up and incentivising community engagement as well as raising funds to pre-finance new project ideas, games and content.

Membership

Gamers, creators and other entities looking for a GameDAO membership providing contribution and earning opportunity, without the ability to create their own DAO or e.g. fundraising campaign, can do this by staking $GAME, the access and governance token of GameDAO, into the respective pool.

Creators seeking to create and coordinate their own DAO and campaigns through GameDAO gain their membership by:

1. Individual invitation through a member
2. Project promotion through community scouting
3. Staking $GAME tokens into the staking pool or providing collaterals
4. Acceptance of an application

The deposited tokens act as a security deposit and result in earning $GAME over time. Users desiring to participate in GameDAO need to stake a minimum of assets. This operation exposes trust in the platform and will be rewarded with $GAME token or NFTs. The ratio of staked asset to earned $GAME may be determined through a bonding curve.

Deposited/Staked $GAME can be removed at any point in time. If the staked balance passes the lower limit for $GAME, the holder will lose its membership privileges until the required balance is restored.

Therefore, while $GAME tokens might be traded at secondary facilities, membership requires the currently set equivalent ratio to stable assets as a collateral deposit to keep the membership alive.

Everybody can become a member, but active seats in GameDAO council are limited to forty-two (42). Seat holders are council members with advanced capability and responsibility, e.g. giving testimony about a successful milestone delivery.

Identity

To become an active member of GameDAO, initial identity information needs to be provided to create an ecosystem-wide decentralised identity (DID). This allows for platform operation in a legal manner, provides transparency and guarantees for the GameDAO community.

The identity system will be initially provided via partners like KILT (e.g. Social KYC), Fractal.ID and is currently being integrated in ZERO Network as a network primitive, providing identity and payment flow for GameDAO.

Identity is cryptographically abstracted away to make it inefficient to reveal private data of a user without its consent.

In certain cases, users are required to reveal their identity to proceed in e.g. monetary transactions (KYC/AML) or audits when participating in certain protocol execution.

Identity comes with additional features for the ecosystems connected to ZERO, namely trust, reputation and experience metrics, which are powered by:

1. Provision of social identifiers strengthening the Trust (T) level of an identity
2. Continuous contribution of activity into their experience levels (XP)
3. Social feedback of other ecosystem participants, contributing to the reputation (REP) of an identity

These all together, T, XP, REP and the opaque identity provide increased trust and protection of the user base, enabling barrier free interaction for coordination and fundraising with GameDAO.

Voting and Coordination

Holding and staking $GAME empowers the holder, depending on the amount, to:

1. Vote on proposals related to GameDAO (e.g. members, protocol upgrades)
2. Participate in and initiate public motions
3. Join ongoing fundraising campaigns
4. Initiate a campaign for their own interest (e.g. as a creator)
5. Participate in designated governance of “Creator DAOs” where they are member or participated as a contributor of funds in campaigns

In general, GameDAO utilises a variety of voting algorithms, like Simple / Weighted Majority or Quadratic Voting. In Quadratic Voting, each participant is given a number of credits that can be used to vote for a motion. However, the cost of casting more than one vote for a motion is quadratic, not linear. Therefore the marginal cost of each additional vote is far higher than of the previous vote.

If a member does not hold any $GAME token, they can maintain their access to the platform, but will lose all before mentioned powers.

Treasury

GameDAO earns transaction fees, paid in stable coins available on the respective network, through operation and utilisation of the platform. These fees are collected in the GameDAO Treasury. These funds can be utilised based on community proposals and votings to support further development of protocols and fundraising campaigns. Therefore these fees are serving a common purpose, sustainably powering the platform and community initiatives.

$GAME Token

$GAME Token is the access and governance token of GameDAO and therefore a utility token. There will be a maximum supply of 100,000,000 $GAME.

$GAME Token can not be used for payments within the GameDAO ecosystem and do not represent any rights for dividends, revenue shares, interest payments, intellectual property rights or any other form of financial participation.

To become a member of GameDAO, $GAME Tokens have to be staked.

$GAME Tokens enable its holders to exercise certain functions on the legal body and coordination processes. The supply of tokens will determine their price. A bonding curve may enable price discovery upon invocation of $GAME Token.

Protocols

GameDAO protocols allow:

1. Creation of unstoppable, community driven DAOs (CONTROL)
2. Governance within DAOs ( proposals & voting ) (SIGNAL / NOISE)
3. Creation of fundraising campaigns (FLOW)
4. Incentive mechanisms for DAO members through NFTs (TANGRAM)
5. Issuance, management and transfer of game licenses as NFTs (CONNECT)
6. Interact in a safe way with other protocol users (ID + SENSE)

Collateral

Users, especially creators aiming to invoke a protocol, may need to provide a reasonable collateral. This can be provided as:

1. Deposit in platform currency ( stable coins, DOT, KSM )
2. Deposit of fungible assets ( e.g. ERC-20 )
3. Deposit of non fungible assets ( e.g. ERC-721, ERC-1155 )

This allows for high value collectables to be utilised as collateral in creation of a lending pool or alike, if a price can be determined.

GameDAO Council can support cases with Treasury assets, if e.g.a collateral is not sufficient in relation to a campaign’s aimed fundraising cap, to satisfy the collateral requirements.

Collaterals can be accompanied by respective insurance, reducing the amount provided by a depositor but incurring cost for the delta between the amount provided and amount covered by an insurance party.

CONTROL — DAOs & Organisations

DAO based organisations are the common denominator for all initiatives operating on GameDAO protocols. They provide a wide range of configurable parameters:

1. Public / Private
2. Access Control: Self onboarding, invitation, application, number of members
3. Fees: Staked / Paid into the respective DAOs treasury
4. NFT based Item Drops based on joining and participation
5. Custom Token

SIGNAL / NOISE — Governance

Governance provides means of control and influence to its empowered members, sometimes directly linked to a fundraising campaign.

To incentivise participation, active members may receive various perks and rewards:

1. Voting releases $GAME and increases XP, REP.
2. Creating motions releases $GAME, increase REP when successful and increase XP, decrease REP when rejected.
3. Votes can be delegated.
4. Votes can be acquired at cost of $GAME and other assets.
5. Simple Majority, Weighted Majority, Quadratic Voting, Conviction Voting

Eligible members may be rewarded with additional token provided by a campaign / project.

Example: A project raised their desired cap and chose to continue with a Prepaid campaign with coordination. The project’s creator wants to withdraw the raised funding in 4 milestones. Upon the first milestone, 25% of eligible voters participate in an approval voting and 55% of the participants vote to agree on the delivered product. The desired amount will be transferred to the project creator.

TANGRAM — Item Drops & Incentive Mechanisms

Tangram is the underlying incentive engine enabling advanced NFT based reward mechanisms. Organisations/Creators DAO created on GameDAO can give back to their e.g. campaign supporters through generation of limited quantity collectables, which in turn can be used for access control, rare game items, as creative artefacts providing flex to the recipient portfolio.

FLOW — Fundraising

In order to (pre-) finance the development of new games - or even (in a future step) to allow stakes in the creators company - GameDAO offers different Fundraising Protocols for creators starting fundraising campaigns..

Grant & Donation

Community coordinated funding, honouring achievements or common good projects, roughly defined project ideas and its creators. Grants and Donations are not refundable and do not give any rights or claims to the contributors to this campaign.

With Governance (follow below), successful campaigns store their balance in a treasury, where the release of funds is partially automated or moderated by the coordination DAO members upon request of the creator.

Crowdfunding / Prepaid / Rage Quit

A prepaid campaign is a product being paid for in advance resulting in the right to use the final product: A game license, provided as a unique token (NFT) to the contributor.

After successfully delivering defined milestones, the contributors receive their token plus predefined additional perks.

When the creator fails to deliver, the community may Rage Quit out of the campaign, resulting in immediate termination of the campaign and return of remaining funds to the contributors.

Lending

Lending and Borrowing are one of the DeFi superpowers growing into maturity during the last years. GameDAO will establish a solid framework merging traditional fundraising and borrowing of funds, including the ability to use alternative valuables, like NFT, as collateral assets.

During Fundraising, the creator either directly collects contributors agreeing to the creators terms for a lending pool or taps an existing pool with existing conditions. These conditions consist of factors like collateral ratio, annual percentage rate (APR) and can be collateralised by the creator with the Intellectual Property (IP) of his product being created.

Upon completion, funds are transferred immediately into the creator's collateral balance. Creator can utilise up to the currently defined (by the pool or in his proposal) percentage of his collateral. Loan cost will be deducted daily until the Loan is paid back in full.

Shares

Shares are a future outlook and require additional legal work to make this fly. Besides fulfilment of regulatory requirements, depending on the funding volume, additional requirements may apply.

Please watch out for further discussion on our Medium and public announcement with further details.

Fundraising Process

The Fundraising Process can be divided into the Fundraising Phase itself and a Coordination Phase, which follows the successful completion of a campaign and governs the period of validity of the campaign.

Fundraising Phase

The Fundraising Phase consists of few steps:

1. Setup Account + Identity
2. Select Fundraising + Coordination Protocol
3. GameDAO Council Approval
4. Launch

During Fundraising, creators will promote their campaign and collect supporters with their funding. If a campaign reaches the desired minimum cap, it is considered successful.

Funds provided by contributors are locked until the end of the campaign. Depending on the campaign’s outcome, funds will either be returned to the contributors (unsuccessful) or stored in a campaign escrow, to be processed by the coordination protocol.

Coordination Phase

Reaching the coordination phase means a campaign was successful, which is a remarkable testimony for the creator, as this reflects trust in the capabilities and idea of creator and product by the council and, more important, by the community.

Depending on the protocol ( Grant, Prepaid, Loan, Share ) the raised funds can be released in various ways, giving supporters different types of guarantees and influence opportunities along the process of creating the project.

Campaigns can be created with or without Governance, but at least one of the four baseline protocols, Grant, Prepaid, Loans or Share, will define the way funds are released to the creator.

Without Campaign Governance

1. Grants paid immediately to the creator.
2. Prepaid campaigns release payments on an automagic time schedule defined by the creator on invocation of the protocol.
3. Loans will be released immediately to the creator, based on the loans’ terms.
4. Shares will be immediately released, but may imply further regulatory requirements.

With Campaign Governance

All participants of a campaign will automatically become part of the coordination DAO to propose and approve (withdrawal) votings:

Upon campaign creation, the creator can propose either milestones or deliverables which in turn release funds, when the coordination DAO, consisting of contributors and representatives of the GameDAO council as supervisors, approves.

Any participant of the coordination DAO can create proposals to interact with the campaign creators in a transparent and coordinated fashion.

Campaigns featuring Governance, provide coordinated exit from a campaign during coordination phase, when deliverables or milestone quality do not meet the expectations of the DAO members (“rage quit”), resulting in resolution of the protocol and return of the remaining funds to the contributors, based on their fractional contribution.

This results in measurable quality, protection and guarantees for contributors as well as higher success rates of funded campaigns.

GameDAO Setup

GameDAO aims to set up a Cooperative in the European Union as this legal body resembles the idea of a DAO in the best way. This could preferably happen in a country with innovative approaches to setup and operation of a body, e.g. the Fürstentum Liechtenstein.

Many challenge the idea of why a DAO would need a centralised legal body. From our understanding, Cooperatives and DAO resemble each other. Providing protocols serving a common good will result in legal barriers to overcome — or to live on a blockchain, without any touchpoint to the old world.

This is a major drawback for adoption of this idea, as we aim to evolve from an experiment into an operational entity, on and off chain, bridging two worlds which belong together in a future we want to contribute to.

At this point in time, GameDAO has been set up as an intermediate stock company, GameDAO AG, which is based in Vaduz, Liechtenstein. The following months will resolve how a legal body can be integrated into a DAO in the best way possible, e.g. a DAO controlled Foundation or, as mentioned above, as a Cooperative.

Roadmap

GameDAO is currently in beta, running on zero network. Currently we are preparing for our planned public launch in Q2/2022. This requires additional effort, especially on the topics Identity, Audit and Regulatory requirements.

To account for that, we are currently also fundraising to increase product and engineering power as well as covering expenses for legal work. Further information will follow through our websites, blog and newsletter.+++

Final Remarks

Execution of an experiment or idea like GameDAO is always standing on the shoulders of giants and walking on the edge of many intersecting aspects. GameDAO will become a sustainable player by support of the community, not only by funding, but mainly by providing expertise and by applying it.

The future will also bring deeper integration of DAOs into everyday life and especially GameDAO, integrating deeply into video games and metaverses, bringing community powered ownership to the masses.

Support us and let’s create better business models together: If you want to contribute or support our efforts, write to us or join our Discord.

Thanks for the great inspiration by initiatives like RadicalXChange, TokenEngineering and all the projects pushing the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem and an interoperable future!

Last but not least, thanks to you, our incredible team, the game community, continuously innovating, and supporters like Outlier Ventures, giving a thesis like GameDAO as an Operating System for the future of video games reasonable traction and amplification.

Glossary

Overview of terms used in the document:

Asset-Referenced Token, European Commission, MiCA

Bonding Curve, The token bonding curve is an emerging crypto economic primitive: protocol based incentive systems that enable coordination of network participants to achieve shared goals. Tokens incentivize players in an economic game towards an outcome that are mutually beneficial.

DAI, a stablecoin cryptocurrency which aims to keep its value as close to one United States dollar (USD) as possible through an automated system of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.

DeFi, Decentralised Finance, DeFi platforms allow people to lend or borrow funds from others, speculate on price movements on a range of assets using derivatives, trade cryptocurrencies, insure against risks, and earn interest in savings-like accounts.

Ethereum, The ERC-20 (Ethereum Request for Comments 20) Token Standard allows for fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.

$GAME Token, utility token providing access and governance functionality on GameDAO Protocols.

NFT, A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable.

$PLAY Token, asset referenced token on Zero Network.

Quadratic Voting, a collective decision-making procedure which involves individuals allocating votes to express the degree of their preferences, rather than just the direction of their preferences. Further Reading on Hackernoon

RadicalxChange, is a global movement for next-generation political economies. It advances plurality, equality, community, and decentralisation through upgrades of democracy, markets, the data economy, the commons, and identity.

Token Engineering, is a cross-disciplinary field that draws from established practices in systems, electrical, robotics & controls engineering, and more.

ZERO Network, a multichain for video games, built with Parity substrate.

Disclaimer

This document is not financial advice and not considered final and subject to change without further notice. If you want to learn more or contribute improvements, please reach out to us.