Author: Zen, PANews

Last week, a third-person battle royale game called (Off the Grid) (OTG) became one of the focuses of the entire gaming community. In the trial live broadcasts of many top-tier game anchors, the 3A-quality OTG was also praised by many mainstream players for its cyberpunk aesthetics, cool action design and excellent game graphics - although most of them were unaware that this game is actually a Web3 game.

OTG was developed by crypto game developer Gunzilla Games and is currently available in early access on the Epic Game Store, PlayStation 5, and Xbox. After being promoted by multiple game streamers, OTG quickly became popular and has topped the list of free games on the Epic Games Store since last week. It has also received at least hundreds of thousands of live broadcast views on the Twitch streaming platform alone.

The total financing scale is over 100 million yuan, and the development took nearly 5 years

Video game developer Gunzilla Games was founded in November 2020 by Alexander Zoll and Vlad Korolev to create a new generation of AAA shooter games. At the beginning of its establishment, Gunzilla Games announced that it had received $25 million in financing. The initial funds came from GameGroove, a venture capital fund founded by Korolev and Zoll in 2019, focusing on technology and games.

Alexander Zoll was the CEO of Crytek Kyiv Studio and is known for leading the development of the well-known online shooting game (Warface). Vlad Korolev is a serial entrepreneur in financial technology and a game enthusiast who founded a free video game website on his own in the 8th grade.

Shortly after Gunzilla Games was launched, the two founders assembled a luxury team. Oscar-nominated screenwriter and District 9 director Neill Blomkamp joined Gunzilla as Chief Vision Officer, responsible for narrative and visual arts; British science fiction writer and Altered Carbon author Richard K. Morgan served as screenwriter; Timur Davidenko, who was the technical director of the game engine CryEngine and participated in the development of Far Cry and Crysis, served as Chief Technology Officer. Most of the other members of the Gunzilla development team also came from various well-known studios and publishers, including Ubisoft, Electronic Arts (EA), Blizzard Entertainment, THQ, etc., and participated in the development of famous series of games such as Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs, Total War, or Need for Speed.

In May 2022, Gunzilla Games announced that it will launch a new AAA battle royale third-person shooter game Off The Grid (OTG), and said that the game will be released on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, and is expected to be available in 2023.

Three months later, Gunzilla Games announced the completion of a new round of financing of US$46 million, led by Republic Capital, which focuses on blockchain and cryptocurrency, and participated by Griffin Gaming Partners, Animoca Brands, Jump Crypto, Raptor Group, CoinFund, Shima Capital, Blizzard and other crypto VCs. While disclosing the huge amount of financing, Gunzilla Games officially announced its entry into the blockchain game field, stating that it would allow players to obtain "full ownership" of game assets and realize "in-game item transactions" by building a digital economic platform "GunZ" that integrates NFT technology. However, Gunzilla is not focused on creating a pure NFT game. It promises that OTG players can skip related functions and directly enjoy the full version of the game for free, and also guarantees that it will not sell NFTs or other hidden consumption directly to the player community.

In March of this year, Gunzilla Games completed another large round of financing, with a total of US$30 million in funds, led by CoinFund and Avalanche's Blizzard Fund, and a US$10 million strategic token financing participated by Republic Capital and Morningstar Ventures.

Build 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 encompasses all of our favorite elements,” Vlad Korolev said in a previous interview.

Currently, Off The Grid has opened an early access version on PC, and it is called an open beta version on PS5 and Xbox, but the actual functions opened in the game are the same, and only the Extraction Royale mode is provided. OTG inherits the mechanism of classic battle royale games such as Call of Duty and Apex Legends, but its cyberpunk-style equipment and props give players a richer experience. In addition to firearms, players can also use jetpacks to achieve more flexible movement, as well as replace and use mechanical prostheses with different abilities in the game. Gunzilla said that excluding skins, it is expected to launch more than 260 unique weapon combinations in the future.

Like 3A games that pursue exquisite graphics, Gunzilla also used Unreal Engine 5 during the game development process. By introducing its Nanite technology, OTG was able to render high-quality graphics and textures with extremely high levels of detail. Combining tools such as World Partition and Geometry Collections, Gunzilla creates a large and detailed open world with extremely realistic environments, characters, and objects without sacrificing performance or using too much memory. Its level of detail (LOD) model allows OTG to optimize game performance by reducing the level of detail of objects that are far away from the player or less important. The light and shadow effects given 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 build a layer 1 solution for games where we could achieve zero transaction fees, secure and verified source code, environmentally friendly protocols, and the ability to pay gas fees with native tokens." In April 2023, Gunzilla Games announced the launch of GUNZ, a blockchain-based digital economy platform built entirely on AvalancheSubnet. GUNZ is committed to becoming one of the first player-friendly crypto-economies in 3A games, aiming to empower players by granting them full ownership of in-game items in the form of NFTs, and the platform will also be integrated into OTG first.

Web3 games are going mainstream? It’s still a bit difficult...

In the second and third quarters of this year, various point-earning games on the TON ecosystem really attracted a lot of attention. They attracted tens of millions of players in a short period of time by relying on the expectation of airdrop rewards. However, after the airdrop, the small games were widely criticized by the community, and it is obviously difficult for them to become a large-scale adoption hope. At this time, the "semi-finished products" launched by OTG, which have been brewing for many years and are of high quality, can become popular games on the Epic Store, which once again gives Web3 game enthusiasts a glimmer of "hope".

According to AVASCAN data, as of October 15, the transaction volume on GUNZ has exceeded 50 million, and the number of independent wallets has exceeded 5.6 million. In addition, according to SullyGnome data, the game has been watched for more than 2 million hours in the first week. From being mediocre to gaining unprecedented popularity among mainstream players, in addition to its own excellent quality, Gunzilla Games' great success in marketing and promotion is another major factor. It sponsored many well-known game anchors such as Ninja, Timthetatman and Ludwig Ahgren to live-stream trial play, which attracted a lot of attention and then attracted more anchors or bloggers to participate. Dr.Disrespect, a top FPS anchor who has cooperated with OTG and has been controversial recently, said that he liked this game. During the live broadcast alone, he brought at least hundreds of thousands of viewers to OTG.

But it should be pointed out that just like these top game anchors only talk about the game itself and avoid mentioning Web3 games such as NFT or cryptocurrency, OTG's official game page also does not see any promotion related to NFT, GUNZ or blockchain technology. The word "NFT" can only be found in the FAQ, but it is still emphasized here: "Off The Grid is not an NFT game. This is a battle royale game with optional NFT elements. If you want to try NFT, you can; if you don't want to, you don't have to. Players can decide how to play the game by themselves, and they can play the game without using NFT." In summary: I can be a non-chain game. While most mainstream game players are not stingy with their praise, most of them don't know that OTG can also be considered an NFT game.

The popularity of Off The Grid has also attracted many anchors and bloggers who have not accepted sponsorship. YouTube gaming blogger Tomographic is one of them. In his trial video, he gave a detailed introduction to Off The Grid's NFT before the game. In the comment section of the video, the highly praised comments suddenly changed their tone, and all became such as "This game does look interesting, but when NFT entered the topic, my interest dropped sharply."

Tomographic said that most players do not realize that (Off the Grid) is leading the trend of Web3, they just enjoy the game itself. "I am not stopping you from enjoying the game or going to war with cryptocurrency. It's just something I am not interested in, and I don't want to promote it on my channel. The volatility of cryptocurrency is disturbing, but OTG is indeed the largest example of blockchain gaming we have ever seen, and I think it is worth talking about." He added.

In addition to the NFT and cryptocurrency dispute, the early access version of (Off the Grid) also has problems with gameplay. According to the configuration parameters listed by Epic, the devices used by PC players usually need to meet at least Intel I7 12700 and RTX 4070 to achieve a better gaming effect. The recommended minimum configuration RTX 3060 cannot take into account both the picture and smooth gaming experience. For most players, regardless of encryption or not, the game itself, such as insufficient optimization, too high hardware configuration requirements, and shooting sound effects, are the problems that Gunzilla is most concerned about.

However, as the version is updated and the game is continuously optimized, the full version of (Off the Grid) may eventually face the controversy brought about by NFT and cryptocurrency elements. From the beginning, Gunzilla has also taken out a countermeasure to allow players not to choose NFT integration in order to maximize the favor of mainstream players.

Therefore, it is difficult to predict whether Off the Grid can maintain its traffic after gaining great attention. Even if it can be "successful" in the future, how much of it is related to Web3 is even more unknown. What will be the future of Off the Grid? Will it always be the representative of Web3 games? We will wait and see, and PANews will continue to pay attention.