Off The Grid: The Crypto Battle Royale That Hid Its Wallet on Steam

Most battle royales sell you a skin. Off The Grid tried to sell you a whole idea: that the gun you loot, the arm you bolt onto your character and the outfit you wear could be yours in the way a trading card is yours, tradeable outside the game on a blockchain. Two years after it opened its doors, the interesting part of the story is not the idea. It is how hard the studio has worked to make sure most players never have to notice it.

Off The Grid is a free-to-play, third-person cyberpunk battle royale from Gunzilla Games, a studio based in Frankfurt, Germany. It entered early access on 8 October 2024 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via the Epic Games Store, and arrived on Steam on 17 July 2025. As of November 2026 it is still in early access: Gunzilla's October progress report sets the 1.0 release window at 27 December to 15 January, after an earlier target of October 2026 slipped.

What kind of game it is

Matches drop up to 150 players onto Teardrop Island, a fictional slice of dystopia. The pitch mixes PvP and PvE: other players are the main threat, but the island also has AI enemies, vaults and turrets. The signature twist is the cybernetic prosthetics. Instead of only picking up guns and armour, you install cyber-limbs that change how you move and fight, which gives fights a more gadget-heavy, improvised feel than a standard shooter.

The world comes with an unusual pedigree. The storyline is directed by Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9 and Elysium, and the writing credits are shared with novelist Richard K. Morgan. The game runs on Unreal Engine 5, and since the Steam launch it has offered cross-play between PlayStation, Xbox and PC.

Where the blockchain sits

The game's items can be traded on a marketplace tied to Gunzilla's own GUNZ blockchain and its GUN token. The developers' line has always been that the NFT layer is optional, and in practice most of the on-chain activity has happened in the background. When Blockworks looked at the numbers about eight months after launch, it counted roughly 200,000 daily active wallets, up from 40,000-170,000 in the first month, but noted that most of that activity was still on a testnet, not the final chain.

The two storefronts even describe the game differently. The Epic Games Store listing states that Off The Grid uses blockchain and NFT technology; the Steam listing does not mention it at all. For a player, the practical result is the same on both: you can download the game, queue up and fight without creating a wallet, and the trading layer only appears if you go looking for it. Gunzilla has been funded heavily to make that balancing act work, including a $30 million round reported in March 2024.

That matters, because the migration to the real mainnet keeps moving. It was originally pencilled in for September 2026; the October report pushed it to the 1.0 launch, with Gunzilla promising that owned items, serial numbers included, will carry over.

The Steam test

Valve's store does not allow games that use cryptocurrency or NFTs, which made a Steam release look impossible for a while. Gunzilla announced a June 2025 Steam date on 21 May 2025, then quietly launched on 17 July 2025 instead. The Steam store page made no mention of blockchain or NFTs, and players argued about whether the Steam build was separate from the crypto layer at all.

The first numbers were respectable for a free shooter with no marketing blitz: about 11,800 concurrent players on Steam the day after launch, according to SteamDB figures reported at the time. The early reviews were split, around 65% positive from 312 reviews. Players praised the atmosphere, the gunplay and the fresh take on the genre, and criticised:

• Performance, especially on mid-range PCs.
• Bots: some reviewers claimed a large share of opponents were AI fill.
• Monetisation: abstract currencies, wallet pop-ups and external shops.

Before the Steam launch, on Twitch, the game had struggled to stand out: Blockworks counted under 1 million hours watched in a month and about 1,400 average viewers, ranking it 157th among games.

What two years of patches changed

Gunzilla's own October 2026 report reads like a list of fixes for those complaints. All of these figures are self-reported by the studio and have not been independently checked:

• A July 2026 performance patch lifted an RTX 2060 test machine from 42 to 164 FPS.
• Proximity chat arrived on 4 August; a movement rework, new combat HUD and a shooting range came on 27 August.
• Kestrel, a new anti-cheat trained on more than 15 billion gameplay segments, launched in October, followed by a first ban wave on 21 October. Over half the violations (55%) were macro or recoil scripts.
• Retention, Gunzilla says, improved by 7.95% at day 1, 20.74% at day 7 and 34.81% at day 28 over the five months the report covers.

By the numbers

• 8 Oct 2024: early access on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Epic.
• 17 Jul 2025: surprise Steam launch; about 11,800 concurrent players the next day.
• 150: maximum players per match.
• 26,200: record marketplace trades in the anniversary week, per Gunzilla.
• GUN token, as of 12 Nov 2026 (CoinGecko): price $0.001683, market cap about $6.74 million, circulating supply 4.0 billion of a 10 billion maximum, 98.5% below its all-time high of $0.115.

Token prices are volatile; these figures are a dated snapshot, not a forecast.

Tokenomics in plain words

GUN has a fixed maximum supply of 10 billion, and about 40% of it is in circulation, so the majority is still to be released over time. In-game, the token is the currency of the item marketplace: players spend GUN to buy items from each other, and Gunzilla's report says GUN spent on purchases rose 51% after its Marketplace 2.0 update. The planned mainnet move is the big unresolved piece, because it decides where items and their histories actually live.

WGC's take

Off The Grid is the most serious attempt yet at a blockchain shooter that does not feel like a crypto product. Its best moments come from the game, not the token: cyber-limbs, a dense island and a studio that clearly listens to complaints. Its weakest point is transparency. Almost every number that would tell us how many people play comes from Gunzilla itself, and the market has priced its token at a tiny fraction of its peak.

What to watch

The 27 December-15 January window is the moment of truth. Watch for three things: whether 1.0 actually lands in that window, whether the mainnet migration goes smoothly, and whether Steam player numbers grow once the "early access" label comes off. If you are curious, the game is free on Steam, Epic, PS5 and Xbox, and you can play it without ever opening a wallet.