It’s rare that a new shooter is able to make a lasting impression in the current climate. With behemoths like Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, and others maintaining a stranglehold on the shooter audience, the genre represents one of the most competitive go-to-market challenges, whether on PC, console, or mobile.

Yet that is exactly what Off The Grid is trying to do. The new third-person, cyberpunk-themed battle royale from Gunzilla Games launched its early access on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S on October 8th. It garnered immediate interest from players and commentators alike on the strength of its influencer marketing campaign, twists on genre conventions, and integration of blockchain elements.

Despite the gaming public’s distaste for anything with the slightest whiff of web3, Off The Grid has done well early on. It topped the Epic Games Store’s “Most Popular Free-to-Play PC Games” list at its debut, garnering nearly 150K viewers and more than 1M hours watched on Twitch.

Buoyed by sponsored and unsponsored sessions alike from mega-streamers such as Ninja, Timthetatman, Shroud, and others, Off The Grid peaked at over 160K unique active wallets (UAW) and is currently vacillating in the 100K-160K range at the time of writing.

Off The Grid’s continued success is far from guaranteed, but its strong showing in Early Access has done enough to encourage its supporters and generate curiosity among the broader shooter audience ahead of its full launch, which is TBD, according to the game’s FAQ. 

As is typically the case with major blockchain game releases, the hyperbole among web3 supporters has been loud and proud. In fairness, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that in terms of mainstream attention, Off The Grid has been the most successful web3 launch since Axie Infinity. But will it live up to the hype?

The Team & Strategy

Off The Grid creator Gunzilla Games first announced its intentions to “make a AAA shooter for next-gen hardware” in the fall of 2020. Led by industry veterans Vlad Korolev (a serial gaming and fintech entrepreneur) and Alexander Zoll (former CEO of Crytek’s Kiev studio), the team has gone on to raise more than $75M across seed, Series A, and other rounds. Investors include Griffin Gaming Partners, Animoca Brands, Jump Crypto, Shima Capital, and other largely cryptocurrency-oriented funds.

Split between London, Frankfurt, and Kiev, the company has grown to 300-plus employees, according to LinkedIn, roping in some prominent creatives in the process. Gunzilla’s Chief Creative Officer and fellow co-founder is Oscar-nominated director Neill Blomkamp ("District 9", "Elysium", "Gran Turismo"). Gunzilla has also brought in experienced writers Richard K. Morgan ("Altered Carbon", "The Steel Remains") and Olivier Henriot (Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, The Division) to shape the game's narrative, which includes a planned 60-hour single-player campaign. For reference, the just-released Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign clocks in at 10 hours or less, according to HowLongToBeat.

Gunzilla’s choice to lean into story and narrative as a differentiating element is an interesting one, given the hit-or-miss nature of new IPs and the potential for an expensive content treadmill to follow. The game’s “strong emphasis on narrative progression” is mentioned repeatedly in Off The Grid’s PR and marketing. A cynical observer might view it as a ploy for legitimacy in the eyes of otherwise crypto-skeptical gamers, but we will have to wait for the game’s full launch and live service plans to emerge before evaluating its success in this field.

Off The Grid has also added some interesting wrinkles to the battle royale experience. Its Cyberlimb system allows players to equip a variety of enhancements (shields, movement buffs, unique attacks, etc.) and adds a new type of loot to pilfer from defeated enemies.

The game also incorporates verticality via jetpacks and ziplines, features an extensive weapons customization system, and has plans to increase its 60-player rounds to accommodate up to 150 at full launch.

As for its business model, the game’s Early Access version is completely free-to-play and features a battle pass and content packs. Interestingly, though, nearly everything beyond the core gameplay appears to be locked behind an "OTG PRO" subscription for the time being. 

There are few details regarding that 60-hour campaign, though. We know there will be PvE elements, and likely cinematic interludes from the aforementioned creators, but we don’t know if the campaign will be a free add-on, a full premium release, a set of paid DLCs, or something else entirely. Word on the street is it will be "free-to-access," but nothing has been publicly revealed as yet.

Off The Grid is also playing in the increasingly crowded extraction shooter subgenre, which is where its blockchain integration figures into the equation.

How OTG Integrates Web3

Players are able to collect an item called a Hex, which they can try to extract from the map or hang on to until the end of the round, should they emerge victorious. Each Hex contains in-game items that can be traded for a token ($GUN), but must be opened at specific in-game locations called Nodes.

Players do not have to engage with these web3 elements should they choose to ignore them. While items earned during early access will eventually carry over, the game is currently using a testnet rather than the GUNZ blockchain it will eventually operate with.

Reaction to the web3 elements has ranged from mixed to positive, given the light touch Gunzilla has applied in making everything optional. The streamers have been largely optimistic about the NFTs (not entirely unpredictable for sponsored streams), and reviews on both PlayStation and Epic Games Store are hovering around 3.9 out of 5, at the time of writing.

Obscured though they may be, the web3 elements are where some of Gunzilla’s larger ambitions come into play. GUNZ is actually a custom Avalanche subnet, which also comes with its own marketplace, chain explorer, noncustodial wallet, and companion app — all of which the company plans to white label and share with other developers. Gunzilla already operates another game on the GUNZ chain, a mobile drone flying game called Technocore, and hopes to attract additional teams with its GUNZ SDK.

This will be easier said than done, of course. Gunzilla Games is far from the only web3 gaming company trying to use its flagship game as a Trojan horse to disguise a broader infrastructure play. It also faces a harder path to distribution, given its web3 integration — it’s not on Steam and is already fighting for attention in an extremely competitive genre.

Its lack of a Steam presence also makes it challenging to find reliable active player counts. The aforementioned unique active wallets metric has been used as a proxy, but we have no way of knowing what percentage of players actually choose to engage with the wallet or how many of those players try to create multiple accounts in an effort to farm the digital assets.

Gunzilla vs. the King Kongs

All that being said, one would think blockchain is a perfect match for extraction shooters. The genre itself plays with our lust for virtual assets — be they in-game loot, digital cash, or in Off The Grid’s case, NFTs.

The extraction shooter genre is also currently winnable, with no clear leader dominating the space. Escape from Tarkov is long in the tooth, Activision appears to have thrown in the towel on Call of Duty’s DMZ mode, Nexon’s Dark and Darker has not taken off as initial hype may have indicated it would, and Helldivers 2 is fully PvE (and may be stretching the definition of an extraction shooter, despite its Steam tag).

However, the genre is quickly getting more and more crowded. Tencent has two forthcoming extraction shooters in Arena Breakout: Infinite and Delta Force, both of which rank highly on Steam’s wishlist rankings. There’s also Arc Raiders (from Nexon and Embark Studios, creators of The Finals), Nakwon: Last Paradise (a zombie-themed extraction shooter, also from Nexon), and Bungie’s Marathon, among many others.

The magnitude of what it means to win the extraction shooter genre is certainly debatable, but the field appears to be wide open, with potential for the largest winners to expand the genre. Can Gunzilla score the first big win for itself — and by proxy the broader blockchain gaming ecosystem?

The team’s first battle will be solving player retention. It’s no surprise that activity (at least, as judged by viewers and streams) appears to have dropped off from the game’s initial marketing push. Most of the streamers promoting Off The Grid have already moved on to the recently launched Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. The game’s unique active wallets (UAW) numbers appear resilient, but again, UAW is an imperfect proxy for users. Off The Grid continues to rank highly on Epic’s Most Popular Free-to-Play list (No. 2 as of this writing), but without Steam data or other reliable information, we can only speculate.

Also impacting retention will be the game’s early issues with optimization. Many players have reported performance issues, even on high-end gaming rigs. The developers are also facing numerous reports of cheating, going so far as to offer bounties to its community for help with identifying cheat software.

Assuming the team is able to address these challenges, it is also worth keeping an eye on its approach to live ops and monetization as it gears up for its full launch. The decision to lock its battle pass, weekly tournaments, clan tags, and other features behind a subscription seems to be a play to expose more players to Off The Grid’s web3 elements. I’m skeptical of the efficacy of that approach, particularly for a game that claims its blockchain elements are totally optional. A more conventional F2P/premium split with microtransactions might serve Gunzilla better from both a monetization and retention perspective. 

I’ll also be particularly interested to see what sort of engagement it can drive with its story-first approach in a genre that tends to shoot first and ask questions later. Shooter players certainly love a good campaign mode, but whether that drives business results is another question entirely. Will access to the campaign also require an OTG PRO subscription? Will the campaign figure into the game’s monetization plans at all? A 60-hour freebie could do wonders from a public perception point of view, but if it fails to break beyond the blockchain gaming echo chamber, it could be a costly investment.

Of course, these concerns all come downstream of the initial retention challenge. If Gunzilla is unable to sustain early retention and faces the pop-and-drop that many of its fellow genre entrants have seen in the last year or two, what then? The team has certainly raised plenty of money to try and execute its vision, but does it have the runway to pivot and iterate its way to success if needed — particularly with a massive campaign mode drawing resources away from the multiplayer experience? Will other developers still be interested in building on the GUNZ platform in the absence of a winning flagship title?

Final Thoughts

It's certainly too early to dismiss Off The Grid. Gunzilla Games is doubtless charting a difficult path and taking an ambitious approach. Blockchain or not, the company should be commended for what it has built thus far.

Despite early criticisms, the game is polished, fast-paced, competitive, and most importantly, fun to play — independent of any web3 elements. Gunzilla has proven that with a big enough marketing budget, blockchain-enabled games can indeed garner attention in one of gaming’s most crowded markets. I suspect we’ll see more deep-pocketed web3 game developers attempt a similar approach, particularly if Off The Grid’s token or marketplace take off in any meaningful way.

It’s too early to announce a verdict on the game’s web3 elements, given its Early Access release and testnet operational status. Off The Grid doesn’t appear to be subject to the red flags faced by earlier standard-bearers of blockchain gaming: There is no play-to-earn element artificially inflating engagement, and as far as we can tell, no bots overstating player counts.

We won’t be able to judge the game’s token-driven economy until full release, but given that access is essentially pay-gated (players cannot sell on the marketplace without an OTG PRO subscription), we know that Gunzilla will at least be partially compensated for taking on the added risk. Of course, that begs the question: If players need to pay for a subscription to sell their NFTs, did they ever really own them in the first place?

Perhaps the true lesson of Off The Grid is that the real challenge for blockchain-enabled games is not the particulars of the web3 implementation, but rather the ability to grab gamers’ attention on the merits of the game itself. It’s an old lesson for the rest of the industry, but one that many blockchain gaming companies are still figuring out.

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