Earlier this week, multiple former and current Gunzilla employees claimed online that the company, which owns Game Informer and runs NFT battle royale Off the Grid, owes them months of back pay and is not communicating with affected staff about the situation. In response, Gunzilla CEO Vlad Korolev penned a 650+ word tweet calling critics “haters,” denying claims his company hasn’t paid full-time devs, and bragging about crunch.
On April 9, just days after accusations were posted on LinkedIn that Gunzilla was not paying some staff, Korolev posted a lengthy message on his personal Twitter account claiming that “haters” have been attacking Off the Grid and Gunzilla for years and that the accusations that the company is stiffing employees on pay are just the latest example of people spreading “FUD” about the company online. The CEO didn’t deny that some people aren’t getting paid right away, but claimed this was only happening with contractors, not full-time employees, and was only done to “not disrupt company operations.”
While people who have never played OTG and have never built a business sit and spread FUD 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…
— Vlad Korolev (@VladK133) April 9, 2026
“Today, there is a new narrative from haters—that Gunzilla incorrectly laid off contractors or paid them with delays,” posted Korolev.
“Yes, we are optimizing 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 6 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 apologize 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.”
This lengthy rant on Twitter follows multiple employees claiming that Gunzilla had failed to pay them for months, with many still claiming to be owed back pay and saying that management at the company had ghosted them completely. Former Gunzilla senior VFX animator Paul Creamer also claimed he was owed months of pay after allegedly working without receiving any checks for an extended period of time in late 2025.
“I foolishly worked for 3 extra months (October, November, and December) with assurances that delays in payment would be resolved,” claimed Creamer. “Upper management promised that these delays were temporary and growing pains tied to being a new company with a new game. In December, the CEO himself (Vlad Korolev) had a call with my department where he promised us that invoices would be paid as soon as possible, that the company was profitable, and that we were all doing the right thing by keeping quiet and continuing to work.”
Bragging about crunch and saving Game Informer
Earlier in the post, Korolev asserted that “haters” have been claiming the studio and its game, Off the Grid, would fail. But the game, he claimed, is doing great, and he credited that to everyone at the studio working hard. But he then seemed to brag about the studio’s employees not having free time and instead crunching to produce Off the Grid.
“Within 6 years, 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,” posted the CEO.
In his long Twitter post, the CEO also pointed to Gunzilla’s acquisition of Game Informer in 2025 following the magazine’s closure by GameStop the year prior. The CEO claimed that it was “bringing new life into the largest printed gaming magazine in the world” and that it continues to “grow day by day.”
Korolev suggested that Off the Grid was also growing rapidly over a year after release and even claimed that anyone could gain access to the company’s player data if they paid him “100k GUN,” Gunzilla’s cryptocoin. Currently, 100,000 GUN works out to about $1,700 USD. Meanwhile, Off the Grid, a game the CEO claims is growing, has never reached more than 20,000 concurrent players on Steam. When someone accused Korolev of using AI to write his long post on Twitter, he replied: “Find a job.”
