Author: Zen, PANews

Last week, a third-person battle royale game called "Off the Grid" (OTG) became one of the focal points in the gaming community. During live streams by several top game streamers, OTG garnered praise from many mainstream players for its cyberpunk aesthetics, cool action design, and high-quality graphics, despite most of them being unaware that it is essentially a Web3 game.

OTG is developed by the crypto game developer Gunzilla Games and is currently available in early access on the Epic Game Store, PlayStation 5, and Xbox. After several game streamers showcased it, OTG quickly went viral, topping the free games chart on the Epic Games Store since last week, and it has also garnered at least hundreds of thousands of live views on the Twitch streaming platform.

Total funding exceeds 100 million, development took nearly 5 years

Video game developer Gunzilla Games was founded in November 2020 by Alexander Zoll and Vlad Korolev, aiming to create a new generation of AAA shooting games. At its inception, Gunzilla Games announced it had secured $25 million in funding, with initial capital coming from GameGroove, a venture capital fund founded by Korolev and Zoll in 2019, focusing on technology and gaming.

Alexander Zoll previously served as the CEO of Crytek Kyiv Studio, known for leading the development of the popular online shooter "Warface." Vlad Korolev is a serial entrepreneur in fintech and a gaming enthusiast who founded a free video game website while in the eighth grade.

Shortly after Gunzilla Games was established, the two founders assembled a luxury team—Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director of "District 9," Neill Blomkamp, joined Gunzilla as Chief Visionary Officer, responsible for narrative and visual arts; British science fiction author and "Altered Carbon" writer Richard K. Morgan took on the role of screenwriter; Timur Davidenko, former technical director of the CryEngine and involved in the development of "Far Cry" and "Crysis," became the Chief Technology Officer. Other members of the Gunzilla development team mostly come from various well-known studios and publishers, including Ubisoft, Electronic Arts (EA), Blizzard Entertainment, and THQ, having participated in the development of famous series like "Assassin's Creed," "Watch Dogs," "Total War," and "Need for Speed."

In May 2022, Gunzilla Games announced the upcoming release of the new AAA battle royale third-person shooter Off The Grid (OTG), stating that the game would be available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, with a launch expected in 2023.

Three months later, Gunzilla Games announced the completion of a new funding round of $46 million, led by Republic Capital, which focuses on blockchain and cryptocurrency, with participation from several crypto VCs including Griffin Gaming Partners, Animoca Brands, Jump Crypto, Raptor Group, CoinFund, Shima Capital, and Blizzard. Alongside the announcement of this substantial funding, Gunzilla Games officially declared its entry into the blockchain gaming space, stating that it would build a digital economy platform called "GunZ" integrated with NFT technology to provide players with "full ownership" of game assets and enable "in-game item trading." However, Gunzilla is not solely focused on creating a pure NFT game; it promises that OTG players can skip related features and enjoy the full game for free, while also ensuring that it will not directly sell NFTs or other hidden costs to the player community.

In March of this year, Gunzilla Games completed another significant funding round, raising a total of $30 million, co-led by CoinFund and Avalanche's Blizzard Fund, along with a $10 million strategic token financing involving Republic Capital and Morningstar Ventures.

Building a new generation of AAA battle royale games with Avalanche

"We drew inspiration from games like PUBG, Apex Legends, The Division, and Uncharted to create a game that includes all our favorite elements," Vlad Korolev stated in a previous interview.

Currently, Off The Grid has an early access version available on PC, while on PS5 and Xbox, it is referred to as a public test version; however, the actual features available in the game are the same, offering only the Extraction Royale mode. OTG inherits mechanics from classic battle royale games like Call of Duty and Apex Legends, but its cyberpunk-style equipment and items provide players with a richer experience. In addition to firearms, players can achieve more agile movement through jetpacks and switch and use different abilities with mechanical prosthetics in the game. Gunzilla claims that, excluding skins, it expects to launch over 260 unique weapon combinations in the future.

Similar to AAA games like "Black Myth: Wukong," which pursue exquisite graphics, Gunzilla also utilized Unreal Engine 5 during the game development process. By incorporating its Nanite technology, OTG can render high-quality graphics and textures with an extremely high level of detail. By using tools like World Partition and Geometry Collections, Gunzilla created a vast and detailed open world filled with incredibly realistic environments, characters, and objects without sacrificing performance or using excessive memory. Its Level of Detail (LOD) models allow OTG to optimize game performance by reducing the detail level of objects that are farther away from the player or less important. The lighting and shadow effects enabled by Lumen technology make the game world more realistic and immersive.

"When we were looking for the best partners to build our blockchain platform and ecosystem, Avalanche was the only company that allowed us to create a Layer 1 solution for games, where we could achieve zero transaction fees, secure and verified source code, eco-friendly protocols, and the ability to pay gas fees using native tokens." In April 2023, Gunzilla Games announced the launch of GUNZ, a blockchain-based digital economy platform built entirely on the Avalanche Subnet. GUNZ aims to become one of the first player-friendly crypto economies in AAA games, empowering players by granting them full ownership of in-game items in the form of NFTs, and this platform will be integrated into OTG first.

Is Web3 gaming making a push into the mainstream? It might be a bit difficult…

In the second and third quarters of this year, various point-earning mini-games in the TON ecosystem truly captured attention, attracting millions of players in the short term through the anticipation of airdrop rewards. However, as the airdrops materialized and faced massive backlash from the community, these mini-games clearly struggled to become a hope for mass adoption. At this time, the "semi-finished product" of OTG, which has been in development for many years and boasts high quality, has suddenly become a hot game on the Epic Store, once again giving Web3 gaming enthusiasts a glimpse of "hope."

According to data from AVASCAN source, as of October 15, the trading volume on GUNZ has surpassed 50 million, with over 5.6 million unique wallets. Additionally, data from SullyGnome shows that the game has accumulated over 2 million hours of watch time in its first week. The unprecedented popularity among mainstream players, aside from the game's high quality, can also be attributed to Gunzilla Games' successful marketing efforts. By sponsoring well-known game streamers like Ninja, Timthetatman, and Ludwig Ahgren to showcase the game, they generated significant attention and subsequently attracted more streamers and content creators to participate. Dr. Disrespect, a top FPS streamer who has previously collaborated with OTG and is currently a subject of controversy, expressed his enjoyment of the game, bringing at least hundreds of thousands of viewers to OTG during his live stream.

However, it is worth noting that just as these top game streamers focus solely on the game itself and avoid mentioning NFTs or cryptocurrencies related to Web3 games, OTG's official game page also contains no promotion related to NFTs, GUNZ, or blockchain technology. The term "NFT" only appears in the FAQ section, where it emphasizes: "Off The Grid is not an NFT game. It is a battle royale game with optional NFT elements. If you want to try NFTs, you can; if you don't want to, you don't have to. Players can completely decide how to play the game, and it can be played without using NFTs." In summary: I can be a non-blockchain game. While most mainstream gamers lavish praise on the game, many are unaware that OTG can also be considered an NFT game.

The high popularity of Off The Grid has also attracted many streamers and content creators who have not received sponsorship, one of whom is YouTube gaming creator Tomographic. In his gameplay video, he provided a detailed introduction to Off The Grid's NFTs before playing the game. In the comments section of the video, highly upvoted comments shifted to remarks like, "This game looks really interesting, but my interest drops sharply when NFTs come into the conversation."

Tomographic stated that most players are not aware that "Off the Grid" is leading the Web3 trend; they are simply enjoying the game itself. "I don't stop you from enjoying the game or battling with cryptocurrency; it's just something I'm not interested in, and I don't want to promote it on my channel. The volatility of cryptocurrency is unsettling, but OTG is indeed the largest example of a blockchain game we've seen, and I think it's worth discussing," he added.

In addition to the NFT and cryptocurrency debate, the early access version of "Off the Grid" also has issues with gameplay. According to the configuration parameters listed by Epic, PC players typically need devices that meet at least Intel I7 12700 and RTX 4070 to achieve a decent gaming experience, while the recommended minimum configuration of RTX 3060 cannot adequately balance graphics and smooth gameplay. For most players, setting aside the crypto aspect for now, the lack of optimization, high hardware requirements, and issues like shooting sound effects are what Gunzilla is most concerned about.

However, with version updates and ongoing game optimization, the full version of "Off the Grid" may ultimately face controversies arising from the inclusion of NFT and cryptocurrency elements. Gunzilla has also implemented strategies from the beginning to allow players to opt out of NFT integration to maximize appeal to mainstream players.

Therefore, whether Off the Grid can maintain its traffic after gaining significant attention is difficult to predict. Even if it achieves "great success" in the future, how much of that will be related to Web3 remains unknown. What will the future hold for Off the Grid? Will it continue to represent Web3 games? We will wait and see, and PANews will continue to follow up.

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