Off The Grid Early Access Ends October 2026: GUNZ Explained

Gunzilla's own five-month roadmap, published through Game Informer, gets specific: marketplace and performance polish through summer, anti-cheat plus the testnet-to-mainnet asset migration in September, public release in October.

Read it knowing who owns the outlet. Gunzilla bought Game Informer out of GameStop in 2025, and that roadmap post ran as sponsored content. Honestly, I'd be mildly surprised if a battle royale exited early access in the exact month it first named.

GUNZ, Off The Grid's blockchain layer, went live as an Avalanche-based L1, mainnet and the GUN token launching together on March 31, 2025. Listings calling it "a Layer 1" aren't evidence it left Avalanche. Avalanche rebranded its subnets as L1s in 2024. Same chain.

The split nobody covers: the Steam build runs on GUNZ testnet with no live blockchain features, while PS5 and Xbox already have mainnet Off The Grid NFTs and the marketplace switched on. Steam's blockchain-content policy is why. The Steam store page doesn't say NFT, crypto or blockchain anywhere.

The token: GUNZ's own site says GUN buys and trades marketplace items and can be earned through in-game challenges. The Defiant reported that 30% of gross revenue is earmarked to buy GUN back and pay it out to players by performance. Generous on paper, and unanswerable at scale until mainnet reaches PC.

Off The Grid is probably the most expensive live test anyone's running of bolting a token economy onto a real battle royale shooter, and it's doing so in the middle of web3 gaming's roughest year yet. Real budget, Blomkamp attached, shipped consoles, a Steam release. The verdict is unsettled: 61% positive across 1,446 Steam reviews, which Valve labels Mixed. Not a flop. Not a win.

The operational picture looks rougher, the kind of thing that shows up on a checklist of warning signs a web3 game is struggling. PC Gamer covered Gunzilla's CEO responding publicly to contractor pay disputes dating to mid-2025. I'm not linking that to the launch date, because no source does.

Concede the obvious. Off The Grid's on-chain economy is bigger, better funded and further along than Stellarch's: mainnet NFTs on two console platforms, a live token, that buyback mechanic, a marketplace people trade in today. Stellarch ships none of that.

What Stellarch backs is narrower. Combat resolves through a seeded-RNG engine, so a match replays byte-identically from its seed. You re-run it and check the math yourself instead of trusting a studio's loot odds, the core idea behind provably-fair gaming. It plays in the browser, a fresh account drafts a full legal team from a synthesized ghost catalog without owning a card, and signup takes email or Google, no wallet. It's closed alpha with a waitlist, no crypto withdrawals, no ranked token earning.

So it isn't a swap, not while Off The Grid early access already has the bigger marketplace running. Want a AAA shooter with a real on-chain marketplace? Gunzilla's the only shop open. Want to verify a result instead of trusting one? Read what Stellarch's founding charter actually offers, then get on the waitlist.