Dean Hall built his name on a zombie survival mod that turned into one of the best-selling PC games of its era. Today the industry is talking about something he did not build alone, but that carries his fingerprints all over it. Ahwoo, working with RocketWerkz, has released BRUTAL, a free, open-source game-development framework, and the gaming press moved fast to cover it. GamesIndustry.biz broke the news on October 15, 2026, and outlets from Eurogamer to Game Developer followed within hours.
The pitch is simple on paper: take the source code, build a game with it, or strip it down and build your own engine on top of it. No licensing fee. No royalty cut. One condition attached. That combination, free and open with zero revenue share, is rare enough in game development that it is driving a real conversation about who controls the tools studios depend on.
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What Is BRUTAL, and Why Is Everyone Talking About It
BRUTAL is an open-source game-development framework developed by Ahwoo in collaboration with RocketWerkz, the studio Dean Hall founded after DayZ. As of this week, its source code is publicly available for anyone to inspect, fork, or build on. That is the headline fact, and it matters because frameworks of this kind rarely ship with their internals exposed.
The framework gives developers two paths. They can build a game with BRUTAL directly, treating it as a ready-made foundation, or they can use it as the base layer for a custom engine built on top. Either way, the code is theirs to study and modify, which is the part that has drawn the most attention from developers tired of black-box tooling.
Coverage spread quickly beyond the usual English-language gaming press. Japan’s Game*Spark and China’s 18183.com both ran their own versions of the story within the same news cycle, a sign that the release struck a nerve well outside the DayZ fan base.
From DayZ to RocketWerkz: Dean Hall’s Track Record
Dean Hall is best known as the creator of DayZ, the mod-turned-standalone survival game that helped define an entire genre of open-world, permadeath multiplayer games. He later founded RocketWerkz, the studio behind Icarus and, more recently, the ambitious space simulation project Kitten Space Agency.
That history is relevant to why BRUTAL is getting attention beyond its technical specs. Hall has spent the past decade building games at increasing scale and complexity, and RocketWerkz has had to solve engine-level problems along the way rather than simply license an existing solution off the shelf. BRUTAL is, in effect, the studio handing over part of that internal toolkit to the rest of the industry. RocketWerkz has already used the framework in its own production, applying it to Kitten Space Agency, which gives the release a track record rather than treating it purely as a theoretical offering.
Under the Hood: C#, Vulkan, and Native Code Access
BRUTAL is built in C#, a language choice that lowers the barrier to entry for a large pool of developers already comfortable with Unity’s scripting environment or general .NET tooling. But C# alone would not explain the interest. The framework also provides access to native APIs and high-performance C/C++ libraries, including Vulkan, the low-overhead graphics API that Khronos Group maintains as a cross-platform alternative to DirectX and Metal.
That combination, a managed language on top with native, high-performance code underneath, is the architecture pattern most modern engines converge on eventually. What is notable here is that BRUTAL exposes that layering rather than hiding it behind a closed editor or a proprietary scripting layer. Developers who want to drop into Vulkan directly, or call into C/C++ libraries for performance-critical systems, can do so without working around the framework’s own abstractions.
Framework, Not Engine: Why That Distinction Matters
Ahwoo and RocketWerkz have been explicit that BRUTAL is a framework, not a game engine, and the distinction is doing real work in how the release is being discussed. An engine like Unreal or Unity ships with an editor, a rendering pipeline, asset management, and a long list of built-in systems that a team adopts more or less wholesale. A framework hands over lower-level building blocks and lets the studio decide what gets built on top.
Game Developer reported that the RocketWerkz side of this announcement is framing frameworks, rather than monolithic engines, as the direction game development is heading. That framing lines up with what studios already building their own engines have said for years: the parts of an engine that are genuinely generic, memory management, windowing, graphics API bindings, are a lot of repeated, unrewarding work, while the parts that make a game distinctive are usually custom anyway. A framework targets exactly the generic layer and leaves the distinctive layer alone.
The License Terms: Free, No Royalties, One Catch
The terms attached to BRUTAL are about as permissive as commercial game tooling gets. It is free to use, including in commercial games, and no royalties or percentage of game revenue are required, a sharp contrast to engines that collect a cut once a title crosses a revenue threshold. Dean Hall laid out the terms plainly in the announcement:
“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.”
Dean Hall, Founder and CEO of Ahwoo and RocketWerkz, via the Ahwoo Forums announcement
The one catch is attribution. Any game built with BRUTAL has to include a BRUTAL copyright notice in its credits. That is a far lighter obligation than a revenue share, and it costs a studio nothing beyond a line in a credits screen, but it is still a condition, not a pure public-domain release.
“There are no royalties and we don’t want a percentage of your game’s revenue.”
Dean Hall, Founder and CEO of Ahwoo and RocketWerkz, via Eurogamer
Early Adopters: Kitten Space Agency and RimWorld’s New Engine
BRUTAL did not arrive untested. RocketWerkz has already used it in Kitten Space Agency, giving the framework a live production credit from the studio that helped build it. More striking is the second confirmed user: Ludeon Studios, the team behind RimWorld, has used BRUTAL alongside its own engine, Waylith.
That second adoption matters because Ludeon is not a RocketWerkz subsidiary or a close partner studio chasing a favor. RimWorld is one of the most successful simulation games of the last decade, built by a team with every reason to be selective about what goes into its next engine. Its decision to build Waylith with BRUTAL as part of the foundation is an early, independent signal that the framework holds up outside the studio that made it, rather than only working well in-house.
Dean Hall on the Industry: Pointed Words for Epic and Unity
Eurogamer reported that Hall accused the industry’s dominant engine makers of letting the business “rot from its core” through “greed,” naming Epic’s Unreal and Unity specifically as examples of companies he says have “consistently” failed to be held accountable to the creators who build on their platforms. That is sharper language than most studio founders use when announcing a new piece of middleware, and it reframes BRUTAL as less of a product launch and more of a statement about who should hold the leverage in game development.
The framing is consistent with comments Hall has made about why BRUTAL exists in the first place. Giving developers the source code and the right to build on it, he argued, is a way of handing back some of the control that studios lose when they build their careers on top of engines they cannot see inside or modify.
BRUTAL at a Glance
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Developer | Ahwoo, in collaboration with RocketWerkz |
| Classification | Open-source game-development framework (not a game engine) |
| Core language | C# |
| Native access | Native APIs and high-performance C/C++ libraries, including Vulkan |
| Cost to use | Free, including in commercial games |
| Royalties | None, no percentage of game revenue required |
| License condition | Attribution required, including a BRUTAL copyright notice in game credits |
| Confirmed use in production | Kitten Space Agency (RocketWerkz) and the Waylith engine (Ludeon Studios, RimWorld) |
| Source code status | Publicly available |
How BRUTAL Stacks Up Against Unreal, Unity, and Godot
Placed next to the three tools most working game developers already know, BRUTAL’s position becomes clearer. It is not trying to replace Unreal Engine or Unity as a full, editor-driven production environment, and it is not positioning itself as a direct swap for Godot’s open-source, no-royalty model either. It occupies a narrower, lower-level slot: a toolkit for teams that want engine-level control without starting from a blank text editor.
| Tool | Classification | Source Code Access | Revenue Model | Attribution Required |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BRUTAL | Framework | Fully open | Free, no royalties | Yes, in credits |
| Unreal Engine | Engine (editor-driven) | Source available to licensees | Royalty or revenue-share model above a threshold, per Epic’s published terms | No, by default |
| Unity | Engine (editor-driven) | Closed, proprietary | Subscription or revenue-share pricing, per Unity’s published terms | No, by default |
| Godot | Engine (editor-driven) | Fully open | Free, no royalties | No |
The closest philosophical match in that table is Godot, another zero-royalty, fully open project. The practical difference is that Godot is a complete editor and engine aimed at teams who want a ready-made production environment, while BRUTAL is explicitly a lower-level framework for teams who want to assemble their own. Both approaches sit at the opposite end of the spectrum from Unreal and Unity’s licensing models, which has fueled much of the online reaction comparing all four. The release lands right as indie teams are already weighing which engines and frameworks best fit small-studio budgets, giving BRUTAL an audience already primed to compare its terms against the alternatives.
Historical Context: A Recurring Pattern in Game Tech
Studios open-sourcing internal tools is not new. id Software released the Doom and Quake engine source code years after those games shipped, and those releases seeded an entire generation of fan-made mods, ports, and derivative engines. What makes BRUTAL different is timing. It is not a legacy codebase released once it stopped being commercially useful, it is a current framework that RocketWerkz is actively using in its own ongoing production, released to the public while it still matters competitively.
That timing choice echoes a broader shift already playing out across gaming, where studios are rethinking how much of the development stack they build versus license. Our coverage of how AI-assisted development is reshaping tooling decisions inside major studios traces a similar pattern: teams increasingly want to own and understand their core systems rather than inherit someone else’s black box.
Market Impact: What This Means for Indie and AA Studios
The studios most likely to feel BRUTAL’s impact are not the largest publishers, who already have the budget to build or license whatever they want. It is the indie and AA tier, the teams who have historically faced a binary choice between a free engine with real constraints and a paid engine with real costs once a game ships successfully. A free framework with no royalty exposure removes one side of that tradeoff entirely for teams willing to do more engineering work themselves.
That calculus matters more in a year when the business side of gaming has already been under pressure. Layoffs and consolidation have hit major publishers hard, as seen in Ubisoft’s recent round of job cuts tied to a wave of gaming mergers and acquisitions, and smaller studios operating on thinner margins have less room to absorb licensing costs than they did a few years ago. A tool that removes a recurring revenue obligation, even a modest one, changes the math for teams counting every dollar before a launch.
There is also a platform-reach angle worth watching. Our recent look at Steam’s record concurrent-user numbers this year shows a PC gaming audience that keeps growing, which means any framework that lowers the barrier to shipping a PC title is launching into an expanding market rather than a shrinking one.
What Developers Are Saying
Dean Hall has framed BRUTAL’s release as being about control as much as cost. Several of his public statements since the announcement get at why he thinks source access matters more than the price tag attached to it.
“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.”
Dean Hall, Founder and CEO of Ahwoo and RocketWerkz, via GamesIndustry.biz
“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.”
Dean Hall, Founder and CEO of Ahwoo and RocketWerkz, via the Ahwoo Forums announcement
“You are only as independent as your tools are.”
Dean Hall, Founder and CEO of Ahwoo and RocketWerkz, via the Ahwoo Forums announcement
Taken together, the statements describe BRUTAL less as a product and more as an argument: that the four-year head start needed to build a competitive engine from scratch is itself a barrier worth removing, independent of what it would otherwise cost a studio to license one.
What Comes Next: Predictions for BRUTAL’s Adoption
A handful of things seem likely to play out over the coming months, based on how similar open-source tooling releases have gone in the past and on what is already confirmed about BRUTAL’s current footprint.
- Expect a wave of smaller, hobbyist and solo-developer projects to adopt BRUTAL first, since they have the least to lose by experimenting with a new, unproven-at-scale framework.
- Watch for custom engines, similar to Ludeon’s Waylith, to emerge from mid-size studios that want engine-level control but lack the resources to build every low-level system from zero.
- Expect continued friction between Ahwoo/RocketWerkz’s framing of BRUTAL and the responses, if any, from Epic and Unity, given the pointed criticism already aimed at both companies.
- Expect the attribution requirement to become a minor point of community discussion, particularly around how it should be implemented in games that also use other open-source libraries with their own credit obligations.
- Expect comparisons to Godot to keep surfacing in developer forums, since both tools share the free, no-royalty, open-source core even though they target different layers of the development stack.
None of this guarantees BRUTAL becomes a mainstream alternative to Unreal or Unity within a single development cycle. Engine migrations are slow, and most studios mid-project will not switch foundations over a single announcement. The more realistic path is gradual: new projects starting from scratch, particularly from teams who already share Hall’s skepticism of the large commercial engines, choosing BRUTAL as their starting point rather than Unreal or Unity by default. Any such shift would also play out against a PC and handheld hardware market already in flux, including the ongoing three-way price and performance fight covered in our ROG Ally X20, Switch 2, and Steam Deck comparison, since engine choice increasingly has to account for a wider spread of target devices.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who made BRUTAL?
BRUTAL was developed by Ahwoo in collaboration with RocketWerkz, the studio Dean Hall founded. Hall is best known as the creator of DayZ.
Is BRUTAL a game engine?
No. Ahwoo and RocketWerkz describe it as a framework, not a game engine. It provides lower-level building blocks that developers can use directly or build a custom engine on top of.
How much does BRUTAL cost?
It is free to use, including in commercial games. There are no royalties or revenue-share requirements attached.
What are the license conditions?
The main condition is attribution. Games built with BRUTAL must include a BRUTAL copyright notice in their credits.
What programming language is BRUTAL built in?
C#. It also provides access to native APIs and high-performance C/C++ libraries, including the Vulkan graphics API.
What games already use BRUTAL?
RocketWerkz has used BRUTAL in Kitten Space Agency. Ludeon Studios, the developer of RimWorld, has used BRUTAL alongside its own engine, Waylith.
How is BRUTAL different from Godot?
Both are free and open-source with no royalties, but Godot is a complete engine with its own editor, while BRUTAL is a lower-level framework aimed at developers who want to assemble their own engine or build directly on the framework’s foundations.
Did Dean Hall say anything about Unreal and Unity?
Eurogamer reported that Hall criticized the industry’s largest engine makers, including Epic’s Unreal and Unity, saying they have failed to be held accountable to the developers who build on their platforms.
