Dean Hall, creator of DayZ, says "our industry is rotting from its core" due to "greed" at major companies, targeting Epic's Unreal and Unity.

Dean Hall, creator of DayZ, Icarus, and Kitten, launched a fiery attack on some of the world's largest game companies, citing "greed" that is "corrupting" the industry from its core. He singled out Epic (Unreal Engine) and Unity, while promoting an open-source, free alternative: a game development framework called Brutal. Read more

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"Developers have surrendered tremendous control."

Dean Hall, creator of DayZ, Icarus and Kitten Space Agency, has issued a fiery attack on some of the world's biggest gaming companies, calling out the "greed" that is "corrupting" our industry to its core. He took specific aim at engine developers Epic (Unreal) and Unity, while simultaneously backing up his words by launching a free, open-source alternative: a game development framework called Brutal.

"Our industry is rotting at its core," Hall wrote in an extensive post on Reddit.

But I think one of the biggest problems is something we don't talk about enough. Developers have given up too much control over their work to companies whose interests are not necessarily aligned with theirs. So we're doing something about it."

Brutal is a framework rather than a game engine, so it makes it possible to build a game with it - as RocketWerkz Hall has with Kitten Space Agency - or use another engine with it, like RimWorld creator Ludeon has with its Waylith game engine.

"We make the Brutal framework publicly available with its source code, and free to use, including for commercial games, subject to attribution," Hall wrote. "There are no royalties and we don't ask for a percentage of your game revenue."

"Tim [Sweeney] was my hero for a long time..." - Dean Hall

Hall's post shares a lot of details about Brutal's origins, what it is, and who's working on it. He also admits and even emphasizes that Brutal won't be for everyone. "I don't believe it's a tool that everyone should use to make a game," says Hall. "We're not trying to make something that can do everything to everyone."

One particular anecdote that stands out to me is where the spark for this came from, and it seems to have come from asking Epic boss Tim Sweeney a question during a speech at Game Developers Conference 2025.

"Tim was my hero for a long time," Hall said. "A programming powerhouse with a mind that I admired growing up. But over time I grew frustrated with how much discussion seemed to revolve around the last words. Metaverse one year, AI the next. Meanwhile developers grappled with performance, stability and the practical implications of engine manufacturers' decisions."

Kehl asked Sweeney if Unreal was being responsive to developers about these issues, to which Sweeney apparently replied about "making more demos and putting them on social media to counter people who describe games as 'unrealistic evil.'" Hall responded by asking if making more things faster isn't actually part of the problem, creating false expectations about how easy it is to make games.

Hall continued, "I wasn't happy with his response, and I still believe Unreal isn't being responsive enough to developers. Especially when it can take a five percent royalty on the game's revenue above its licensing threshold. I don't think developers have to simply accept this relationship without questioning it."

“You are only as independent as your tools. This is how we fight" - Dean Hall

Hall believes that more frameworks like Brutal will emerge after this, not because they all abandon popular engines—Hall's Icarus uses Unreal Engine 4, by the way—"but because the cost of building alternatives will drop dramatically." He hopes that Brutal can provide developers with a "lifeboat" to survive.

Hall concluded: This technology is a small step towards changing the balance of power. "If the tools are public, if you have the source code, and if you're free to build your own systems on top of them, you have options. And if one day we're not accountable to developers ourselves, they should be able to create the framework. And go their own way. That's important to me. You're only as independent as your tools. That's how we fight."

I spoke with Dean Hall at length almost a year ago to find out what life has been like for him more than a decade after leaving the project he's best known for - the multiplayer survival shooter DayZ. The years have been full of ups and downs, with the confusion of success and then the many challenges he's faced running his own studio and directing projects that don't pan out right away.

Icarus is a co-op survival crafting game that's been out on PC for a few years now, but was released earlier this year for PS5 and Xbox Series S/X. Meanwhile, Kitten Space Agency is the disgraced successor to Kerbal Space Agency, created by Kerbal creator Felipe Falanghe. Space Agency Kitten was released for free last fall through Ahwoo's own distribution platform RocketWerkz, with an optional donation business model—another of Hull's experiments. And so far, it has raised more than $230,000 in this way.