🔫 Welcome to the GUN show

Hey frens. It’s Monday — and I’m moving across the country this week. Wish me luck!

The top gaming tokens are down. Immutable, Sui, Ronin and Pengu have all fallen 7% to 20% in the past week. 

Today’s a slightly shorter edition, so let’s dive in!

— Kate Irwin

P.S. Let me know how you’re liking The Drop! Send me an email at [email protected].

Gunning for a win

Gunzilla Games’ GUN token — for its Off The Grid game and Avalanche subnet Gunz — is now live. 

GUN climbed up 12% since its launch early Monday morning, but has since fallen slightly. As of 11:30 am ET Monday, its price was $0.09. The token had a market cap of roughly $60 million at that time, with 604 million GUN in circulation out of a possible 10 billion. 

GUN already has a trading volume of $126 million just a few hours after launch, per CoinGecko data.

The Gunz chain has already seen over 487 million transactions across 14.5 million wallets, according to Avascan data and Gunzilla’s Director of Web3 Theodore Agranat.

“Unlike most Web3 projects, we've spent five years now building everything first and testing it in testnet for over a year,” Agranat said in an interview with Blockworks, noting that the team chose to launch the token on Binance because it’s the biggest crypto exchange.

Agranat says he’s seen crypto exchanges engaging with gaming projects less over the past year — but says those that did launch largely missed the mark.

Off The Grid is free to play on PC and console — and doesn’t require a wallet or any crypto. The game is largely a skill-based shooter, though some characters’ “cyberlimbs” grant special abilities and items can also be bought and used in the game. 

Those wishing to pour money into the game can pay for Off The Grid’s Pro membership for $12 a month to use the game’s marketplace, which uses blockchain on the backend. But even if you’re playing for free, you’ll slowly earn GUN as you go. 

If you’ve already been playing the game, though, those GUN token numbers you’re seeing won’t be turned into actual GUN tokens, Gunzilla has confirmed. 

“Their main benefits are the rare items that they earned or received with OTG Pro — many of which no one will ever be able to access in the future,” Agranat explained on the benefits for early players in a message.

“Hexes” and other items earned early on will transfer over, though. And while challenging, extracting hexes while playing the game will get you more loot (each hex can be decoded to reveal an item). Agranat noted during our interview that over 380,000 hexes were extracted in just one day last week. 

I’ve sunk some hours into the game so far, and like both solo mode and trios mode. This game is fast — more like Call of Duty’s Warzone than Apex Legends in terms of time-to-kill and overall speed. But even without its crypto elements, Off The Grid brings something unique to the extraction battle royale shooter genre with its cyberlimbs and gritty, futuristic aesthetic. 

A little scoop: Tomorrow, on April 1, expect a “very, very fun new skin activation,” Agranat shared. There’ll be a new skin coming out — could it be April Fool’s-themed?

Bigger picture, Off The Grid is just the beginning for Gunzilla.

“It is just the first of many games that we will launch in our ecosystem,” Agranat said.

Mfers hit with YouTube ban

The “Normal Mfer” video on YouTube — which The Drop previously covered when the animated short launched earlier this month — was banned for roughly three days last week. The short draws from the public domain Mfers Ethereum NFT collection, which was released back in November 2021.

“This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated,” a description read after clicking on the link to the video as of Friday afternoon.

The video and channel were banned on Wednesday, 0xlawl, the Mfer who posted the video through his CC0 Studios YouTube channel, confirmed.

He believes the video was mistakenly taken down because comments from fellow Mfers, which can often match or consist of just a few words, were flagged as spam.

A rep from YouTube said on Friday that someone would look into the issue, but warned it may take a few days to review it. The channel and video have since been restored.

• Animechain.ai is working with the Oasys blockchain to try to compensate anime copyright holders when their work is used to generate an AI image output. The plan is to also protect IP belonging to projects on Oasys.

• Pixel Realm’s NFT marketplace will launch on Sony’s Soneium chain, and games that Pixel Realm incubates will build on Soneium, as well.

This 1/1 NFT from the Parallel game’s avatars collection sold for $53,000 on Sunday: