On the 17th, many Web3 KOLs in the Chinese community used almost identical press releases on Twitter to jointly promote the news of the AAA battle royale blockchain game Off The Grid launching on Steam.

As one of the few blockchain game projects that went live on Binance's spot market in 2025, I downloaded the game on Steam today and experienced it for 2 hours. I also conducted a thorough research on the project's past and present, which I will share with fellow blockchain game players in 3 articles.

About the game background:

1. The game developer is Gunzilla Games, based in Frankfurt, Germany. The team has a strong background in Web2 game development and operation. Its core team comes from the former Crytek Kyiv studio, which worked on major games like Warface (140 million players, $1 billion in revenue), Far Cry, and Crysis, and also participated in the development of the CryEngine engine, which once led the trend in graphics technology (both CryEngine and Epic Games' Unreal Engine are next-generation game engines; however, the CryEngine developer, Crysis, is set to undergo massive layoffs at its German headquarters in February 2025 and is nearing merger and acquisition by other major companies).

2. Off The Grid claims to have undergone a 5-year development cycle, created by a team of 300 people, and is a AAA battle royale shooting game with a total investment of up to $90 million.

3. The Gunzilla Games team not only developed the blockchain game Off The Grid but also launched its own layer 1 public chain, Gunz Network, based on the Avalanche blockchain.

4. The token $GUN is the trading and governance token of the Gunz Network public chain, with a total supply of 10 billion. Staking mining will start on Binance Launchpool on March 28, 2025, and spot trading will begin on March 31. Today, on July 21, the circulating supply is 955 million, and the token price is $0.035.

5. The Off The Grid game has launched its early access version on PS5 and XBOX platforms as well as on the PC platform Epic Games Store on October 10, 2024, and will officially go on sale on Steam on July 17, 2025.

6. Although the token for the Gunz Network public chain has been issued and is on exchanges, this public chain is still in the parallel phase of mainnet and testnet. Only 21,000 players from the PS5 and XBOX platforms have migrated to the mainnet. As of July 7, 2025, the Off The Grid game has nearly 17.3 million wallets on the Gunz Network testnet, with the 21,000 players migrated to the mainnet accounting for only 0.12% of the total player base.

7. Gunzilla Games has raised over 100 million so far. It received a $25 million investment from GameGroove at its inception.

In May 2022, it announced the completion of a new round of financing 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.

In March 2024, Gunzilla Games completed another major financing of $30 million, co-led by CoinFund and Avalanche's Blizzard Fund, with Republic Capital and Morningstar Ventures participating in a $10 million strategic token financing.

8. Players of Off the Grid have made 413,000 in-game asset decodings so far (using in-game $GUN to pay for opening fees to unlock Hex chests, which are also known as hexadecimal in the game). The total trading volume of the in-game $GUN market has reached $12.9 million, and these transactions mainly involve buying and selling game equipment and weapons in the in-game trading market. The in-game $GUN and equipment have not yet been put on-chain (currently all on the testnet), and players obtain equipment by picking up drops and winning Hex chests through battles.

9. If players of Off The Grid are playing the PC version downloaded from Epic Games Store and Steam, then the $Gunz earned in the game cannot currently be withdrawn to the mainnet, so they can only play the game for now and cannot mine, withdraw, or sell.

10. When can PC players of Off The Grid withdraw the in-game $GUN to the Gunz Network mainnet for mining, withdrawal, and selling? The prerequisite for mining, withdrawal, and selling is that Gunzilla Games must first obtain a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) license. The VASP license allows players to use credit cards, PayPal, and other fiat payment methods to purchase in-game items and $Gun, both of which can be put on-chain. Only when in-game items and $GUN tokens go on the Gunz Network mainnet can they become tradable game assets among players. Players can only withdraw tokens on-chain after selling their assets.

11. Gunzilla Games mentioned in its development log on June 15 that the application for the Cayman Islands VASP license is nearing completion. Considering that this license allows users to directly buy virtual currencies and NFTs with fiat, it is almost at the same level as licenses for centralized exchanges, obtaining VASP licenses in mainstream countries like the EU and the US is still quite challenging.

To be continued, I will continue writing about the Steam version gameplay experience and the Web3 economic cycle design of Off The Grid the day after tomorrow.

Let me first share my battle record from playing this game today: