Gunzilla Games Employees Break Silence on Months of Unpaid Wages

Multiple Gunzilla Games employees have gone public with accounts of unpaid salaries stretching across several months, painting a picture of financial distress at one of the most visible web3 gaming studios in the world. The reports surfaced on LinkedIn, where current and former staff detailed delays, broken promises from company leadership, and a pattern of silence from management when employees asked about outstanding wages.

The first post to gain wide attention came from Talent Acquisition Lead Anna Savina, who wrote that Gunzilla Games owes her a debt that covers several months, and that she had dedicated three years of her professional life to the company before being forced to speak publicly. She described significant salary delays with no clear timeline, requests to the CEO going completely ignored, and outreach to the CFO resulting in zero specific information. Savina noted she is an expat with a child, living and working outside her home country, and described the situation not only as a financial issue but one of professional ethics.

Multiple Staff Confirm the Same Pattern

Within hours of Savina's post, colleagues came forward with near-identical accounts. Principal Hard Surface Artist Oleksandr Linovichenko confirmed he had not received payments for August or September. Senior QA Engineer Anton Palii wrote that he was in the exact same situation, five months without a paycheck. Palii added that when he confronted the CEO directly at an in-person meeting, refusing to continue working without proof of payment, the CEO promised in front of colleagues to pay everything owed and end the employment relationship within a day. The payment never arrived.

Senior VFX Animator Paul Creamer posted one of the most detailed accounts, stating that he had not been paid since October 2025, and that some colleagues had their pay delayed even longer. He described working through October, November, and December under assurances from upper management that delays were temporary and tied to being a new company working through growing pains. He wrote that CEO Vlad Korolev personally called his department in December to promise that invoices would be paid as soon as possible, that the company was profitable, and that staff were doing the right thing by keeping quiet and continuing to work. According to Creamer, those assurances turned out to be false, and the company subsequently began ignoring employees' questions and removing their posts in an apparent attempt to suppress the accounts.

Salary Problems Dating Back to June 2025

The issue predates the public LinkedIn posts by many months. An anonymous post on the GameDev DOU forum, first reported on February 13, 2026, described salary problems going back to June 2025, when management initially attributed delays to a transfer failure and promised resolution within two to three weeks. As the summer progressed and no payments arrived, the explanations shifted but the pattern held. By September 2025, the accumulated debt was extending to employees who had remained at the company, averaging 4-6 months of outstanding wages across Ukrainian and European contractors. Frankfurt-based employees, according to Glassdoor reviews, continued to receive their salaries on time, suggesting a geographic split in which workers in Ukraine and across the EU bore a disproportionate share of the financial failure.

Forum and review accounts described meetings being held in small groups, with management offering assurances about the success of Off the Grid and ongoing financing searches, but fixing no specific repayment dates. The DOU post made particular note that Gunzilla's Kyiv team includes Ukrainian specialists working in an active war zone, and argued that months-long salary delays cannot be normalized as standard operational difficulties.

Glassdoor Reviews Compound the Picture

Glassdoor reviews of Gunzilla Games, rated 2.4 out of 5 stars across 70 employee reviews at the time of writing, describe similar conditions in stark terms. One review stated that salaries had been delayed for several months and that management completely avoids communication, with current employees left without clarity and former staff left in silence about outstanding debts. Another described leadership as aggressive and diminishing, characterized as borderline in terms of potential legal action. The overall recommendation rate sits at 38%, and the compensation rating has declined 31% over the last 12 months alone.

The salary dispute is unfolding not in isolation but against a broader backdrop of repeated layoffs, declining engagement with Off the Grid, and a blockchain token that has collapsed in value from its highs.

Off the Grid: From Record Launch to Declining Numbers

Off the Grid launched into early access in October 2024 as one of the most hyped web3 shooters ever released, and by many early metrics it delivered results. The cyberpunk extraction royale, set on the dystopian Teardrop Island and developed with creative direction from Neill Blomkamp, the Oscar-nominated director of District 9, accumulated over 12 million sign-ups, peaked at 120,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch during its launch window, and reported more than 500,000 daily active users in its first month.

The momentum did not hold. Player numbers declined significantly as the initial wave driven by aggressive paid promotion from streamers including Ninja, TimTheTatman, and Scump dissipated, and the game's NFT and blockchain elements became a persistent point of friction with the mainstream gaming audience. Critics noted that sponsored posts advertising Off the Grid consistently failed to disclose its status as a blockchain-integrated title, and that the in-game messaging downplayed NFT mechanics even as loot extraction and the GUNZ marketplace were central to the designed gameplay loop. Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox restricted or limited blockchain functionality on their platforms, meaning full GUNZ wallet access and NFT features were only available to players using the Epic Games Store on PC, creating an uneven experience across the game's launch platforms.

Gunzilla's own Director of Web3, Theodore Agranat, acknowledged in a December 2025 interview that it feels like a universal sentiment in his VC and gaming network that crypto gaming funding has dried up, and that investor attention has shifted toward AI and real-world assets.

The GUN Token Has Lost Nearly 90% of Its Value

The $GUN token launched via Binance Launchpool on March 31, 2025, in what was by several measures one of the largest GameFi token debuts in history. The event saw $15.8 billion staked, 1.7 million Launchpool participants, a seven-month record for the platform, and $126 million in trading volume on day one. The token peaked near $0.115 on launch day.

By early 2026, GUN had settled into a $0.02 to $0.03 range, representing a drawdown of approximately 89% from its all-time high. A brief recovery came in July 2025 when the token expanded from the Avalanche blockchain to Solana via LayerZero, opening liquidity pools on Kamino and Orca. The 24-hour trading volume on the WEEX exchange hit $20.98 million against an $11.16 million market cap at launch on that platform. The recovery did not last. By the time salary complaints began going public, the token was trading near its lows, reflecting what multiple crypto gaming analysts described as a broad collapse in investor confidence in the GameFi sector, rather than a Gunzilla-specific decline alone.

The GUNZ platform itself, an Avalanche Layer 1 subnet built specifically for gaming economies, processed over 740 million transactions across 14 million wallets without downtime. In June 2025, over 21,000 players migrated in-game testnet assets to mainnet, 10,000 validator nodes were activated, and 413,000 HEX decodings generated nearly $13 million in trading volume. The blockchain infrastructure performed. The commercial case built around it did not.

Over $101 Million Raised, Game Informer Acquired Amid Financial Difficulties

Gunzilla Games raised a total of $101 million across six funding rounds. The raises included a $35 million Series A in 2020, a $46 million round in 2022, and a $30 million round in 2024 co-led by CoinFund and Avalanche, with additional rounds through 2025. Investors across the rounds included 1kx, Coinbase Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Republic Capital, and more than 22 others.

In March 2025, while salary delays were already accumulating behind the scenes, Gunzilla Games publicly announced the acquisition of Game Informer, the longest-running video game magazine in US history. Shut down by GameStop in August 2024 after 33 years of operation, Game Informer was acquired by Gunzilla for an undisclosed sum, with the entire original editorial team rehired and the magazine relaunched as an independent entity under Game Informer Inc. CEO Vlad Korolev framed the move as a commitment to preserving video game journalism, and the studio promised the publication would maintain complete editorial independence. Game Informer Director of Web3 Theodore Agranat suggested potential future synergies with Off the Grid Pro subscriptions, though Game Informer's editorial team stated they had no current plans to integrate blockchain technology.

The acquisition was celebrated by the gaming journalism community, but viewed against the emerging salary dispute timeline, it raises questions about how Gunzilla allocated its resources during a period when it was reportedly already accumulating wage debt to its own development staff.

Two Rounds of Layoffs Before the Salary Crisis

The unpaid wage accounts did not emerge in a vacuum. Gunzilla went through two separate rounds of layoffs in 2025, with the second coming in July just three months after the first. Multiple staff posted publicly on LinkedIn during each round, and Gunzilla offered no official comment on either. In the second round, employees described a company restructuring without specific details on scope or reason, and several expressed frustration with the lack of communication.

One employee departing in that period wrote about the games industry as a whole having gone deeply wrong, with brilliant people being laid off every week and the industry failing those who had poured their hearts into it.

The Glassdoor record from both that period and more recent months describes a company where directors routinely belittle employees' work, decisions lack clear direction, the game's decline goes acknowledged but unaddressed, and negative situations are swept under the rug. The compensation rating's sharp 31% decline over twelve months tracks the timeline of both the GUN token drop and the emerging wage arrears almost precisely.

CEO Vlad Korolev Named in Multiple Accounts

Across the various LinkedIn posts and forum accounts, CEO Vlad Korolev appears by name as the individual who made promises that were not kept. Paul Creamer's account names him directly as the person who personally called his department in December to promise payment was coming and that the company was profitable. Anton Palii's account describes Korolev or a senior company leader making an in-person promise at a team meeting, witnessed by colleagues, and then failing to follow through.

The broader pattern described by employees is one of deliberate silence rather than miscommunication. Multiple accounts describe the company removing LinkedIn posts about the salary situation, ignoring messages, and continuing to present an outward image of a functioning studio while staff went unpaid. Creamer described the strategy plainly as hoping employees will quietly go away. He stated he has never recovered lost wages in twenty years as an animator and expects the same outcome here.

The contrast between the company's public communications over the past year, which included a high-profile gaming magazine acquisition, a major token expansion to Solana, and official tournament announcements including the Pioneer Cup in partnership with Flaw Gaming as recently as February 2026, and the internal financial reality now being described by its own staff, is the central story of what Gunzilla Games has become twelve months after launching the most watched blockchain game in history.