Off The Grid CEO Calls Unpaid Staff 'Haters'

Former Gunzilla Games employees have been coming forward on LinkedIn since April 9 to allege that the studio behind Off The Grid has not paid staff for months. Some claim they are still owed wages stretching back to mid-2025. The CEO's response, posted to X, managed to make the situation considerably worse.

Paul Creamer, a VFX and gameplay animator who joined Gunzilla in March 2025 and left a year later, posted the most detailed account. According to his LinkedIn post, he has not been paid since October 2025 and continued working through December on the basis of direct promises from CEO Vlad Korolev. "In December the CEO himself 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," Creamer wrote. He alleges Korolev "was not being truthful" and that the company has since been removing posts and ignoring questions from affected workers. Senior QA engineer Antron Palii alleged five months without a paycheck. UI programmer Riccardo Galdieri, who said he eventually got paid only after involving a lawyer, claimed there are "dozens of people with pending salaries." Concept artist Sergei Kochurkin alleged he was not paid for August and September 2025 and says Gunzilla continues using character designs he created without compensating him for them.

The CEO's Response

Korolev's response on X, rather than addressing the substance of those allegations head-on, opened with a lengthy victory lap about Off The Grid's platform availability. "The same haters who posted thousands of times that we would never appear on Xbox, PlayStation or Steam, were wrong," he wrote. "We are now the only web3 game to date available on PlayStation and Xbox." He then got to the actual allegations: "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."

That framing deserves to be looked at directly. Multiple former employees, named and verifiable on LinkedIn, are alleging they worked for months without pay after being told by management the situation was temporary. One says he was promised payment in a group call with the CEO personally. Another had to hire a lawyer to recover wages. These are not anonymous forum posts from people who dislike NFTs. Calling this a "hater narrative" is not spin; it is an insult to the people making the claims.

Korolev did acknowledge that "some payments may be scheduled in a way that works for the company's cash flow, not always for everyone individually," which is a remarkably candid admission buried inside a post designed to avoid sounding like one. He also noted that full-time official employees have "never" had salaries delayed by more than a week across six years, a distinction that implicitly confirms contractors were treated very differently. His one specific rebuttal was that "one of the loudest voices, a contractor who finished with us just a week ago, was repaid immediately." One. Out of dozens alleged.

Talent acquisition lead Anna Savina, who claimed she was owed several months of salary, has since updated her LinkedIn post to say her personal situation has been resolved. She is, based on the public record, the exception. Creamer has not indicated he has been paid. Galdieri only got paid through legal action. Kochurkin has not indicated resolution. And Gunzilla, for its part, had not issued a formal comment to outlets including VGC and Rock Paper Shotgun as of the time of their reporting.

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