Dean Hall built his name on DayZ, the zombie survival mod that became one of gaming’s breakout hits. On October 15, 2026, he used that platform to light a fuse under the business side of the industry. RocketWerkz, the studio Hall founded, released the full source code of BRUTAL, a C# framework for building games and game engines, free for commercial use and carrying no royalty clause at all. The announcement landed alongside a blunt diagnosis of what Hall thinks is wrong with modern game development, and outlets including Eurogamer and GamesRadar+ picked it up within hours.
The timing matters. Studios across the industry have spent the past several years absorbing fee changes, pricing-tier shifts, and licensing disputes from the engine makers they depend on, a tension tech-insider.org has tracked as marketplaces and storefronts jockey over take rates. BRUTAL’s zero-royalty terms arrive as a direct counter-proposal: build your own tools, Hall is arguing, and nobody gets a cut of what you ship.
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What BRUTAL Is, and Where the Source Code Lives
BRUTAL is described by its creators as a framework for assembling games and game engines, not a finished engine in its own right. That distinction shows up across the coverage: multiple reports, including WN Hub, frame BRUTAL as scaffolding that studios can use to build their own engines on top of, rather than a drop-in replacement for Unity or Unreal. The source code is public on GitHub, meaning any studio, solo developer, or curious engineer can inspect exactly what is and is not included.
That transparency was a deliberate talking point. Hall has stressed that the repository contains no generative AI tooling of any kind, saying: “There is no generative AI inside it, no tooling or scripts for making generative AI assets. Anyone can see for themselves as the repository is public. The framework is a tool for putting a game or engine together, not for generating anything,” a point reported by Eurogamer. In a year when AI-assisted asset pipelines have become a flashpoint across game development forums, that disclaimer was not incidental.
Dean Hall’s Indictment of the Big Engine Makers
Hall did not release BRUTAL quietly. He paired it with pointed criticism of the companies that control the tools most studios rely on, naming Epic Games and Unity directly. “Our industry is rotting from its core, outwards in every direction, and it has been for some time. Driven by greed, driven by a race to the bottom on price,” Hall said, according to Eurogamer’s report on the release.
He went further on the two companies by name, arguing their own behavior is undercutting them: “I want to say developers will tear down Unity and Unreal, but it is Unreal and Unity who are tearing themselves down. Their greed and lack of accountability to developers has left them completely unable to reconcile their need to appear relevant,” Hall told Eurogamer. It is a striking line from someone whose own studio has shipped commercial titles built on licensed engines for more than a decade, and it is part of why the remarks spread as fast as the framework itself, picked up by outlets from Worldnews.com to Russian gaming press.
The License, Line by Line: Free, No Cut, One Catch
The commercial terms are the part most likely to move studio budgets. Hall has been explicit that BRUTAL carries no revenue-sharing component: “There are no royalties and we don’t want a percentage of your game’s revenue,” he said, a line that has been quoted across the coverage of the release. Use in a commercial, shipped game is explicitly permitted.
The catch is an attribution requirement, not a financial one. Reports describe three obligations: credit the BRUTAL copyright notice, display the BRUTAL logo at startup, and include the BRUTAL notice in project files. For a studio weighing that against a percentage-based royalty or a seat-based subscription fee from an incumbent engine, the math is simple even before any legal review: a logo at boot versus a cut of lifetime revenue are not comparable costs.
Framework vs. Engine: Why the Label Matters for the Math
It would be easy to read “free, no royalties” and assume BRUTAL is simply a free engine competing with Unity, Unreal, and Godot. That is not quite what it is. Sources describe BRUTAL consistently as a framework, not a complete game engine, meaning a studio adopting it is still responsible for assembling the rest of the pipeline: rendering decisions, tooling, asset workflows, and the layers that a packaged engine would otherwise provide out of the box.
That is also the source of Hall’s broader argument. As he put it: “I’m not suggesting everyone should make their own game engine. I’m suggesting every developer should have the option to do so, without having to spend four years building the foundations first,” a comment published alongside the release. The pitch is not that every studio should abandon Unreal or Unity tomorrow, but that the barrier to building a custom engine should not require years of unpaid foundational work before a studio can start on the actual game.
Early Builders: Kitten Space Agency and RimWorld’s New Engine
BRUTAL is not a theoretical pitch; it already has adopters. According to Eurogamer, RocketWerkz is using BRUTAL for its own in-development title, Kitten Space Agency, and Ludeon Studios has used it as the basis for Waylith, the new engine reportedly underpinning the next generation of RimWorld. Those are two very different kinds of projects, a space-focused simulation title and a long-running colony-management franchise, which is itself a point in favor of the framework’s flexibility rather than a niche fit for one genre.
For studios watching from the sidelines, Ludeon’s adoption is the more persuasive data point of the two. RimWorld is an established, commercially successful franchise choosing to rebuild its engine foundation on BRUTAL rather than migrate to an off-the-shelf alternative. That is a different signal than an unreleased project experimenting with new tooling, and it suggests the framework is already past the proof-of-concept stage for at least one studio with real revenue on the line.
How Engine Economics Normally Work, and Why Developers Resent Them
To understand why Hall’s framing landed the way it did, it helps to remember what studios have been navigating. Commercial engines have historically combined some mix of royalty-based revenue sharing, seat-based subscription pricing, or storefront-style take rates on top of the development pipeline itself. Tech-insider.org’s coverage of the Epic Games Store’s fee structure has already documented how much of the current industry friction traces back to exactly this kind of arithmetic: a percentage taken at the point a game actually makes money, long after the studio has absorbed all of the development risk.
Pricing-model changes from major engine vendors in recent years have repeatedly triggered public backlash from developers who felt terms were altered after they had already committed to a tech stack. That history is the backdrop against which Hall’s “race to the bottom on price” comment reads less like a generic complaint and more like a specific grievance shared widely across indie and AA studios that have lived through at least one unexpected licensing change mid-project.
Competitive Landscape: BRUTAL Against the Incumbents
Framed purely on licensing terms, BRUTAL’s zero-royalty, attribution-only model is closer to permissive open-source tooling than to a traditional commercial engine deal. The table below lays out where it sits relative to the three names that came up most in Hall’s criticism and in the surrounding coverage.
| Tool | Category | Royalty Model | Source Availability | Named in Hall’s Criticism |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BRUTAL | C# framework for games/engines | None, attribution required | Public on GitHub | N/A (creator’s own project) |
| Unreal Engine (Epic) | Full game engine | Revenue-share royalty model | Source-available to licensees | Yes |
| Unity | Full game engine | Subscription/seat-based licensing | Closed source | Yes |
| Godot | Full game engine | None (MIT-licensed) | Fully open source | Not named |
| Waylith (Ludeon, built on BRUTAL) | Custom engine | Internal, not applicable | Proprietary, built atop open framework | N/A |
The comparison underscores why Hall’s remarks drew blood specifically against Epic and Unity rather than Godot: both of the former run commercial licensing structures that take a cut or charge recurring fees once a studio is already dependent on the toolchain, while Godot’s long-standing open model is closer in spirit to what BRUTAL is now offering at the framework layer.
Market Impact: What Zero Royalties Could Do to Indie and AA Budgets
The practical effect of a royalty-free framework is concentrated at the margins, which is exactly where indie and small AA studios operate. A studio planning a commercial release with modest projected revenue has historically had to budget for an eventual cut to the engine vendor once a game crosses a revenue threshold, even if that threshold felt remote during development. Removing that line item from the financial model changes how a small studio can plan a launch, particularly one aiming for a modest, profitable release rather than a breakout hit.
It also changes the calculus for studios that have been eyeing custom engine development but balked at the time cost. Hall’s “four years building the foundations” framing is a direct appeal to exactly that studio: one with enough engineering talent to build its own tools but not enough runway to spend years doing it before any game-specific work begins. Whether BRUTAL meaningfully shortens that runway at scale is something only time and adoption data, not the announcement itself, can answer. The existing engine landscape for indie developers already spans free and paid tiers, so BRUTAL’s pitch has to compete on more than price alone to shift real decisions.
There is a talent dimension to this as well. Engineers capable of building a custom engine from a C# framework are not interchangeable with engineers who simply configure settings inside Unity or Unreal, and that skill set has historically been concentrated at larger studios that could afford to carry dedicated engine teams. If BRUTAL genuinely cuts years off the foundational work, it could lower the staffing bar for a small studio to attempt a custom pipeline, which in turn could reshape hiring patterns across the AA tier over the next development cycle rather than the current one, since most studios already mid-project will not switch tooling midstream regardless of licensing terms.
Historical Context: A Recurring Revolt Against Platform Taxes
Hall’s broadside is the latest entry in a pattern that has repeated across the industry whenever a platform or tooling vendor is seen as taking more than developers think is fair. Storefront fee structures have drawn similar fire for years, and tech-insider.org has covered how that pressure has played out directly in distribution, including Epic’s own launcher competing on speed against Steam rather than simply on fee structure. The common thread is developers pushing back against intermediaries once those intermediaries are perceived as prioritizing their own margins over the studios actually making the games.
What makes Hall’s move different is that he is not asking a platform to lower its fees; he is removing the fee layer entirely by giving studios the option to build their own tools instead. That is a more structural response than a pricing complaint, and it is part of why the story crossed from gaming-trade coverage into broader technology press within a day of the announcement.
Reported Timeline: Who Broke the Story
The announcement and Hall’s comments spread quickly across gaming outlets in multiple languages within roughly 24 hours, a sign of how closely the developer community was already primed to react to anything framed as a shot at the major engine vendors.
| Outlet | Date Reported | Primary Angle |
|---|---|---|
| WN Hub | October 15, 2026 | BRUTAL as an open-source framework for game development |
| Eurogamer | October 15, 2026 | Hall’s “rotting from its core” criticism of Epic and Unity |
| GamesRadar+ | October 15, 2026 | AI’s role in accelerating industry dysfunction, per Hall |
| Worldnews.com | October 15, 2026 | Aggregated coverage of Hall’s industry remarks |
| Explosion.com | October 16, 2026 | Hall’s “industry is rotting” quote as standalone news |
| ixbt.games | October 15, 2026 | Russian-language coverage citing “greed” at game companies |
The spread across outlets in multiple countries within a single news cycle, including Explosion.com’s standalone coverage of the “rotting from its core” line, is itself a data point: Hall’s comments resonated beyond the usual audience that follows engine licensing news closely, reaching outlets that do not typically cover developer tooling announcements at all.
What Comes Next: Five Predictions for BRUTAL’s Future
With the source code public and at least two known projects already building on it, the next several months will determine whether BRUTAL becomes a genuine alternative path for studios or remains a niche tool used mainly by RocketWerkz and its immediate circle. A handful of outcomes look most likely based on how the release and reaction have unfolded so far.
- Expect a wave of smaller indie studios to experiment with BRUTAL specifically to avoid royalty exposure on low-budget commercial releases, even if most ultimately stick with established engines for full production.
- Watch for other studios with in-house engineering capacity, similar to Ludeon with Waylith, to quietly announce their own BRUTAL-based engines once they are further along in development.
- Epic and Unity are unlikely to respond directly to Hall’s criticism in public statements, but continued developer frustration over licensing terms will keep pressure on both companies’ public relations positioning.
- The attribution requirement, modest as it is, will likely become a talking point in its own right as studios weigh whether a startup logo and notice are acceptable trade-offs against total creative control over branding.
- Expect follow-up reporting on BRUTAL’s technical capabilities and limitations as more developers get hands-on with the public repository, moving the conversation from licensing philosophy to actual engineering tradeoffs.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is BRUTAL, exactly?
BRUTAL is a C# framework for building games and game engines, released by Dean Hall’s studio RocketWerkz with its source code public on GitHub. It is described by its creators and by reports as a framework rather than a complete, ready-to-use game engine.
Who created BRUTAL?
Dean Hall, the creator of DayZ and founder of RocketWerkz, is identified as BRUTAL’s primary developer, with contributions associated with RocketWerkz and Ahwoo.
Does BRUTAL charge royalties on commercial games?
No. Hall has stated there are no royalties and that RocketWerkz does not want a percentage of a game’s revenue built with BRUTAL.
Is BRUTAL completely free with no conditions?
It is free to use, including commercially, but reports describe an attribution requirement: crediting the BRUTAL copyright notice, displaying the BRUTAL logo at startup, and including the BRUTAL notice in project files.
What games are already using BRUTAL?
According to Eurogamer, RocketWerkz is using BRUTAL for its own project, Kitten Space Agency, and Ludeon Studios has used it as the foundation for Waylith, the engine reportedly behind the next generation of RimWorld.
Is BRUTAL a replacement for Unity or Unreal Engine?
Not directly. BRUTAL is a framework for assembling an engine or game, not a packaged, out-of-the-box engine like Unity or Unreal. Adopting it means taking on more of the engineering work that a full commercial engine would otherwise handle.
Does BRUTAL include any AI or generative AI tools?
No. Hall has said the framework contains no generative AI code or tooling for generating assets, and that the public repository can be inspected to confirm this.
What did Dean Hall say about Epic Games and Unity?
Hall criticized both companies sharply, saying the industry is “rotting from its core” due to greed and a race to the bottom on price, and arguing that Unity and Unreal are undermining their own relevance through a lack of accountability to developers.
