"Developers have surrendered an extraordinary amount of control."
DayZ, Icarus, and Kitten Space Agency creator Dean Hall has issued a fiery assault against some of the world's biggest game companies, calling out a "greed" that's "rotting" our industry to its core. He took particular aim at engine-makers Epic (Unreal) and Unity, while simultaneously backing his words by launching an open-sourced, free alternative of his own: a game-making framework called Brutal.
"Our industry is rotting from its core," Hall wrote in an expansive post on Reddit, "outwards in every direction, and it has been for some time. Driven by greed, driven by a race to the bottom on price. It is my position that the games industry was already heading somewhere unsustainable before reverse-engineering and powerful agentic processes became widely available. These have pushed things over the edge.
"But I think one of the biggest problems is something we don't discuss enough. Developers have surrendered an extraordinary amount of control over their work to companies whose interests aren't necessarily aligned with their own. So we're doing something about it."
Brutal is a framework rather than a game engine, so it allows freedom to either make a game with it - as Hall's RocketWerkz studio has with Kitten Space Agency - or use another engine with it, like RimWorld's developer Ludeon has with its game engine Waylith.
"We're making the Brutal framework publicly available, with its source code, and we're making it free to use, including for commercial games, subject to an attribution requirement," Hall wrote. "There are no royalties and we don't want a percentage of your game's revenue."
"Tim [Sweeney] was, for a long time, a hero of mine..." -Dean Hall
Hall's post shares a lot of detail about the origins of Brutal, about what it is and who's working on it. He also admits and even underlines that Brutal won't be for everyone. "I do not believe this is the tool that everyone should use to make a game," Hall states. "We are not trying to make something that can do everything for everyone."
One particular anecdote that stands out to me is about where the spark came from to do this, and it sounds like it came from asking Epic boss Tim Sweeney a question during a Game Developers Conference 2025 talk.
"Tim was, for a long time, a hero of mine," Hall shared. "A powerhouse of a programmer with a mind I admired growing up. But over time I became frustrated with how much of the discussion seemed to revolve around the latest buzzwords. The metaverse one year, AI the next. Meanwhile developers were struggling with performance, stability, and the practical consequences of decisions made by engine vendors."
The question that Hall asked Sweeney about was whether Unreal was accountable to developers regarding those issues, to which Sweeney apparently replied something about "making more demos and putting them on social media to counter people describing games as 'Unreal slop'". Hall countered by asking whether making more things more quickly wasn't actually part of the problem, creating false expectations about how easy games are to make.
"I was not satisfied with his answer," Hall went on, "and I continue to believe Unreal is not accountable enough to developers. Particularly when it can take a five percent royalty on game revenue above its licensing threshold. I don't think developers should have to simply accept that relationship without questioning it."
"You are only as independent as your tools are. This is how we fight back" -Dean Hall
Hall believes more frameworks like Brutal will emerge after this, not because everyone will "abandon" popular engines - Hall's Icarus uses Unreal Engine 4, incidentally - "but because the cost of making alternatives is going to fall dramatically". Brutal, he hopes, might provide developers a "lifeboat" to survive on.
"This technology is a small step towards changing the balance of power," Hall concluded. "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 stop being accountable to developers ourselves, they should have the ability to fork the framework and go their own way. That's important to me. You are only as independent as your tools are. This is how we fight back."
I spoke at length with Dean Hall nearly a year ago, finding out how life had been for him more than a decade after leaving the project he's best known for - multiplayer survival shooter DayZ. The years have been fraught with ups and downs, with disorientation caused by success and then the many challenges faced running a studio of his own and navigating projects that don't immediately work out.
Icarus is a co-op survival crafting game that's been around for a few years on PC, but that launched on PS5 and Xbox Series S/X earlier this year. Kitten Space Agency, meanwhile, is an unashamed successor to Kerbal Space Agency, made by the creator of Kerbal, Felipe Falanghe. Kitten Space Agency was released in pre-alpha for free last autumn, via RocketWerkz' own distribution platform Ahwoo, with an optional donation business model - another of Hall's experiments. And it's raised more than $230,000 so far that way.