Last week, supergroup developer Gunzilla Games teased their upcoming project Off The Grid, a dystopian cyberpunk “battle royale 2.0” in which players perform covert operations in the name of powerful corporations. Not much was shown in the reveal trailer, but the game’s site does provide some useful info — like the fact that Off The Grid will be a PvEvP game with 150-player lobbies — alongside the usual hype-fuel sales pitch of revolutionizing the genre, putting players first, and so on. What Gunzilla fails to mention — anywhere, in fact, including on their social media or other public-facing outlets — is that Off The Grid is being built from the ground up as a blockchain game with a heavy focus on NFT trading.
As stated on one of Gunzilla’s partner sites, Off The Grid will be powered by their proprietary token GunZ (that’s seriously what it’s called) and players will be able to farm GunZ while playing the game in a manner that sounds a bit like Hunt: Showdown’s persistent extraction economy. The difference is that “what you loot, you own,” according to the project description. “It’s just that the game mechanics are way more elaborate than a traditional shooter, translating to more and better loot, which you can trade on the marketplace and get coin for.”
The GunZ token will be used on the game’s NFT marketplace to acquire everything from player housing to weapon upgrades and character customization. Gunzilla are clearly going pretty hard for NFT integration in Off The Grid, and are continuing to make new partnerships in the blockchain space to further their goal. However, the studio doesn’t seem to be ready to reveal the nature of Off The Grid as an NFT project, because at least one prominent content creator who discussed it publicly has been threatened with DMCA action against their channel.
This is about to be a thing I reckon… pic.twitter.com/q3BmcyRoAS
— Bigfry🍟 (@BigfryTV) May 9, 2022
Gunzilla’s lack of transparency is easy to understand. Gaming communities rally against every new blockchain project that attempts to take root in the gaming industry, and rightly so. Blockchain tech is disproportionately harmful to the environment, and it brings no real benefits to players as all of its purported uses already exist and have been in place in gaming for decades. Moreover, the overstated focus on “play-to-earn” models aims to erode the very nature of gaming as a leisure activity and creative hobby.
We have reached out to Gunzilla Games for comment and will update this article as the story develops.
thank you for covering it