The CEO of Gunzilla Games, the studio behind NFT-infected battle royale game Off The Grid, has responded to accusations from former employees that Gunzilla failed to pay them on time. He’s done so in the form of a lengthy tweet which contains both the words “Haters keep making predictions. We keep delivering” and “We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused”.
As we reported yesterday, several ex-Gunzilla workers including animator Paul Creamer and talent acquisition lead Anna Savina accused the studio on LinkedIn of significant payment delays for their work. “Gunzilla Games has not paid its employees for many months but still expects them to work,” Creamer claimed. “I have personally not been paid since October 2025. Some have had their pay delayed even longer. I foolishly worked for 3 extra months (October, November and December) with assurances that delays in payment would be resolved.”
Now, Gunzilla CEO Vlad Korolev, whom Creamer accused of “not being truthful” about the delays, has responded to the allegations in a lengthy tweet which also sees him boast about Off the Grid‘s success and seemingly defend crunch practices at the studio. “While people who have never played Off the Grid and have never built a business sit and spread [fear, uncertainty, and doubt] to farm a few views — targeting the biggest web3 game ever created, a game that represents not only itself but the entire web3 gaming industry in front of traditional gaming — we will keep building for the millions of players who actually love our product,” he wrote.
He went on to assert that throughout the six years of the game’s development “there has never been a single day where anyone worked in a ‘work-life balance’ mode — it has been a day-and-night fight to ship a project of the scale of Call of Duty, built by an independent studio”.
Having spent enough time yelling at clouds, Korolev then addressed the allegations about delayed payments:
Today there is a new narrative from haters — that Gunzilla incorrectly laid off contractors or paid them with delays. Yes, we are optimising costs — like every company in gaming, crypto, and tech is doing right now. We have been doing this for over a year.
And yes, to not disrupt company operations, some payments may be scheduled in a way that works for the company’s cash flow — not always for everyone individually. That’s the reality of the world we live in. But to protect the interests of our players and our full-time official employees — whose salaries, over six years, have never been delayed by more than a week — we operate at a pace that ensures the company continues moving forward.
And of course, we honor every obligation. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused. It’s also worth noting that one of the loudest voices — a contractor who finished working with us just a week ago — was repaid immediately.
Korolev specifically asserting that a “full-time official employees” haven’t faced significant delays, but not lumping contractors in with that makes it sound like they’ve been the group most affected by this scheduling of payments “in a way that works for the company’s cash flow”. What could also muddy the waters slightly here is any staff who’ve been working what would amount to full-time hours on a freelance basis, and therefore would have been invoicing Gunzilla for payments essentially amounting to full-time salaries.
“While our dear haters keep trying to find new reasons why Gunzilla should fail — we will keep responding with achievements,” Korolev wrote to round out his post, pointing to Gunzilla’s ownership of Game Informer having seen the company declared one of ‘the most innovative gaming companies of 2026’ in an article from business magazine Fast Company.
