101: How not to do founder comms
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TLDR :
Gunzilla Games didn’t pay?
Giggles raised pre-seed funding
(No third story this week, sorry…)
🗞️ NEWS
GUNZILLA GAMES DIDN’T PAY EMPLOYEES?
A few days ago, a piece from Insider Gaming came out titled: “Developers accuse Gunzilla Games of not paying salaries for months.” The article details how both current and former employees have yet to receive salaries and how they have been ignored regarding more info on outstanding wages, according to LinkedIn posts
Employees who shared the “wrongdoings” held various roles, including talent acquisition lead, principal artist, senior QA engineer, and senior VFX animator, so it’s not as if entry-level employees weren’t being paid
The (now retired) animator shared in the Insider Gaming piece: “Gunzilla Games has not paid its employees for many months but still expects them to work. I have personally not been paid since October 2025. Some have had their pay delayed even longer.”
Kate Irwin (former Blockworks) added how there’s more to the story, as she started investigating the issue last year after a dozen OTG game testers posted on Steam alleging that they weren’t being paid:
“When I was reporting at Blockworks, I spoke with 6+ different game testers in Ukraine who told me they were hired to play and find bugs in Off The Grid, but claimed they were not getting paid or faced weeks or even months of delayed payments.”
It’s important to note that all testers were hired through a third-party intermediary, and it remained unclear whether the payment issues were caused by this intermediary or Gunzilla
Interestingly enough, these posts on Steam were made almost 2 years ago, as Inhuman pointed out on June 14, 2025. Plus, there seemed to be delays in players receiving their Clash for Cash prizes (the daily $3,000 prize pools)
In 2025, Gunzilla had two rounds of layoffs as part of its restructuring. The same year, they also acquired Game Informer to save the company. A business decision, which many, including myself, still cannot comprehend
Yesterday, Vlad (CEO and co-founder of Gunzilla) responded to the “FUD”, addressing that OTG is doing well and why some payments were made late:
He claims that: “Every single day, 3,000 new players join OTG.” And they’re happy to set up a live dashboard with the player numbers to prove it (accessible with a 100K GUN, or ~$1,600)
The only (now) publicly available metric is the game’s Steam numbers, which peaked at 15,247 CCU 19 days ago and a 12,896 CCU 24-hour peak. Not much different from what their numbers looked like in the 1st week, so I assume most of their (supposed) growth comes from consoles?
OTG’s Steam CCU might even be “manufactured”. The game has also (purposefully?) delayed its mainnet migration for many months. We can guess why…
Furthermore, Vlad says that “haters” are spreading a false narrative of Gunzilla incorrectly laying off contractors and delaying payments, which he describes as a matter of “cashflow optimization”
Yet, their actions seemed more telling, as the talent acquisition lead’s payment issues suddenly got resolved
The whole message from Vlad reads bitter, boastful, it’s AI-slop (“Off The Grid today is not just part of web3 gaming — it defines it”), and desperately tries to prove they’re relevant today, instead of directly addressing the issues at hand and taking some accountability
I highly doubt any comms or PR person read this letter before posting it. Gunzilla, I recommend you read “Ilkka’s long texts” to understand how to put out a founder message
Overall, I remain sceptical of OTG’s “success” and believe they handled this situation quite poorly. Wouldn’t be surprised if the studio had to shut down in the next 12 months either, because the math doesn’t math
GIGGLES RAISES PRE-SEED FUNDING
This week, Giggles shared that they raised $1,234,567 (why? because memes) in a pre-seed funding round led by 1KX. A new social media app that combines short-form content with trading/prediction markets
With Giggles, all content becomes tradeable. Inside the app, you place bets on internet trends (buy shares), which you can then trade. You’re essentially investing in a meme’s viral potential, much like the X meme: “investing in this Tweet at 54 likes”
Memes are viral moments in internet culture, and since Pump democratized launching memecoins, these moments have been “coinified” en masse. Giggles is trying to shorten the meme → memecoin loop of packing the essence of virality, memecoins, and owning a stake in internet trends into one (consumer) platform:
Giggles’ website says: “…the price discovery of all asset classes are becoming downstream of doomscrolling, and vice versa. With meme coins, we saw the emergence of a new social and financial behavior that have only captured <0.1% of its global potential.”
The founding story of Giggles is “interesting” to say the least. According to the TechCrunch article, the idea started as a joke, a meme about a replacement for TikTok, a platform that wasn’t real at the time. One day, one of the founders made a landing page for a fake app, which managed to accrue 100,00 visits in one day. That’s when Jin called his friend Wang to build the app (the co-founders)
An innovative way to find PMF before building anything, I suppose?
Both founders are less than 20 years old. The two started working together as Minecraft YouTubers with a dropshipping business, and later had businesses in media + a food deliveries
The beta for Giggles launched in August 2025 and accumulated over 150K users so far, with 10,000 videos posted. In the next few weeks, there will be a public launch, with over 400K waitlist signups. This will be the first time users will be able to start trading with real money (instead of the “Aura Points” currency)
According to SensorTower, Giggles had fewer than 5K downloads on iOS last month
Unfortunately, the founders of Giggles made the mistake of launching a token early on. In May 2025, the GIGGLES token was launched on Believe to kickstart the idea for the app. But last December, it was decided to sunset the token, now trading at ~$40K market cap
At the time, a snapshot was made of the existing holders, and the team burned their own tokens, meaning that there might be a (proper) future token launch in the books
We’ve seen similar projects to Giggles, like Zora, that blends social media with tradable “creator or content coins” in which users bet on internet memes and share the upside. However, Zora focused more on crypto users, while Giggles is targeting the consumers (e.g., it saw much of its initial growth in American colleges)
Overall, I think Giggles has an interesting consumer angle. Yet, succeeding with a new social media platform is no easy task
FLASH NEWS
Animecoin is launching a collectibles (gacha) platform powered by Phygitals
Kaito Studio’s first content contest is in partnership with Axie Infinity
In S1 of Rugpull Bakery, players got $76,000, but $173,000 was spent on GAS fees
Chandler Thomlison (founder of Sparkball) says it’s time for the next chapter
bRON is now live in Moku’s Grand Arena (+ an airdrop for eligible players)
Fishing Frenzy announces chapter #3, focused on going after new audiences
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Early Games: None
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