Dev drama and studio moves

One week brought three very different signals from game development: a studio behind a live-service shooter faced public pay complaints, five independent teams formed a shared holding company, and a two-person horror studio became a publisher. The hardest story was at Gunzilla Games, the studio behind Off The Grid, a battle royale shooter that the company says pairs 150-player matches with a 60-hour narrative campaign. Former staff told Rock Paper Shotgun that some workers had gone unpaid for months. Gunzilla chief executive officer Vlad Korolev answered on April 10, 2026 and said full-time employees had “never been delayed by more than a week,” while also saying some contractors and ex-staff had faced delayed payments during disputes over deliverables. That is a much narrower defense than “everyone was paid on time,” and it shows how cash pressure can hit studios through freelancers first. Gunzilla’s own site still describes offices in Frankfurt, Kyiv, and London, and its careers page says the company is growing. When a studio is still hiring while payment allegations surface, it usually means the public storefront and the internal balance sheet are telling different stories. (gunzillagames.com/) At almost the same moment, five studios went the other direction and tied themselves together before a crisis forced them to. Nova Assembly brings together Unfrozen, Sad Cat Studios, VEA Games, Game Garden, and Weappy under one developer-led holding structure. The important detail is that they are not merging into one studio. Each team keeps control of its own projects, but shares production knowledge, marketing support, and, in their own description, internal financial backing when one team needs help and another has just shipped successfully. Nova Assembly says the group already spans 10 projects, more than 3 million wishlists across games in development, and more than 10 million video views tied to upcoming releases. That is not a hobby collective; it is a mid-sized support system built by studios that do not want to be picked off one by one. The group also says it wants to build its own publishing arm later. That means Nova Assembly is not just pooling artists and producers like neighbors sharing tools in a garage; it wants control over marketing, release timing, platform relationships, and audience data. Black Tabby Games made a similar move from the other side of the business. The studio behind Slay the Princess and Scarlet Hollow now runs Black Tabby Publishing, and its site says it already has two signed games. One of those games is Prove You’re Human from sunset visitor, the studio behind 1000xRESIST, and Black Tabby Publishing announced it for personal computer on April 9 without a release date. For a two-person developer, becoming a publisher is a way to turn one hit into a pipeline instead of waiting years for the next in-house launch. Put those three items together and the shape of the market gets clearer. One studio is fighting over whether workers were paid, one cluster of studios is building a mutual-aid shell to survive volatility, and one successful indie team is moving up the stack to publish other developers instead of relying on a traditional label.