Avalanche Shooter ‘Off the Grid’ became the top free title on the Epic Games Store

Following the release of Off the Grid Early Access earlier this week, Avalanche-based battle royale shooter is climbing the ranks of the Epic Game Store.

Off the Grid, developed by Gunzilla Games, topped the storefront's most popular free-to-play PC games list on Friday, surpassing Epic's massively popular Fortnite and Rocket League. It is also the first title listed on the store's trend list.

The game pits players against other battle royale shooters like Fortnite and Apex Legends: shoot, loot and survive as the map slowly shrinks. At the same time, the game has its own Avalanche L1 (aka subnet) for the upcoming GUN token and in-game items that can be produced and traded as NFTs.

On the streaming site, Off The Grid was one of the most watched games on Friday. With 148,000 viewers spread across dozens of streams, Off the Grid commanded the same audience as established titles like League of Legends and Grand Theft Auto V.

He had the Spanish stream Ilojuan. arrived With 28,000 viewers on Friday, Destroy Enemies had the largest audience of any Off the Grid stream. Meanwhile, Twitch viewers have consumed nearly 100,000 hours of gameplay since Tuesday, according to reports. TwitchTracker.

Off The Grid's game store traction was highlighted by Matthew Siegel, head of digital assets research at VanEck. On Twitter (aka X), he He wrote “The success shows how blockchain technology can empower players with real property ownership and a decentralized economy,” he said on Friday.

While Early Access for the battle royale shooter opened on Tuesday, however, the title was released in limited form on consoles and PC, with only one map and mode available in the preview. Off-Grid players will eventually be able to mine rare equipment and items as NFTs, but this implementation has yet to be fully realized.

An early access version of the game, played by Decrypt On PlayStation 5, missions and in-game items named in Off-Grid GUN tokens. Still, the token has yet to launch on the Avalanche mainnet, and there are still questions surrounding whether Sony and Microsoft will adopt blockchain in games for their consoles.

Many gameplay clips shared on Twitter Friday included the hashtag #OTGpartner, indicating that they were being paid to feature the game. It included popular streamer Matthew “Nadeshot” Hagg Second day Distribution of topic. Other streamers like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins partnered with Gunzilla Games to release earlier this week, Ninja also got his own in-game character skin.

Edited by Andrew Hayward.