"The industry is rotting from the inside": the creator of DayZ spoke out against large corporations and released the source code of the BRUTAL framework
The creator of DayZ, Dean Hall, published a lengthy post on Reddit where he criticized the current state of the gaming industry. In his opinion, one of the main problems of modern game development is the greed of large tech companies and the dependence of developers on third-party tools.
DayZ
Hall is particularly dissatisfied with companies like Unity and Epic Games, the owners of the Unity and Unreal Engine platforms. He is convinced that both companies exert too much influence on teams worldwide, while being much more concerned with their own profits than with the interests of developers.
As Hall admitted, Epic Games' CEO Tim Sweeney was once his idol. The DayZ creator genuinely considered him an outstanding programmer but gradually became disillusioned. Specifically, Hall is disappointed that in recent years, Sweeney's public speeches have increasingly focused on "trendy" phenomena like the metaverse and AI, while studios continue to grapple with performance and stability issues in Unreal Engine.
However, Hall does not call for an immediate abandonment of Unity and Unreal Engine by everyone. He agrees that these engines remain the optimal choice for many games. Nonetheless, the DayZ creator believes that studios should have the ability to develop their own technologies and retain control over them.
As an alternative, Hall shared the source code of BRUTAL — a C# framework for game development created within his studio, RocketWerkz.
Hall emphasized that BRUTAL is completely free even for commercial games. It can be used both as an engine (although the framework is not fully one) and as a foundation for creating other tools. RocketWerkz used BRUTAL while developing Kitten Space Agency, and Ludeon Studios utilized the framework during the creation of the Waylith engine, to which RimWorld is transitioning.