Dean Hall, the DayZ creator now running RocketWerkz, dropped a public Reddit post announcing Brutal—an open-source C# framework he built with his studio—and used it to torch Epic's Unreal and Unity for letting corporate greed hollow out the industry from the inside.

The framework powers Kitten Space Agency at RocketWerkz and serves as the base for Ludeon Studios' Waylith engine behind RimWorld. Hall made the source code freely available for commercial use with nothing demanded beyond attribution and zero royalties, positioning it as a deliberate lifeboat for developers who want control over their tools instead of handing revenue cuts and decision-making power to engine vendors.

Hall traced the spark to a 2025 GDC exchange with Tim Sweeney, where the Epic CEO allegedly brushed off accountability concerns by suggesting more social-media demos to combat "Unreal slop" talk. Hall called the response unsatisfying and argued that Unreal's five-percent royalty above licensing thresholds leaves developers too dependent on companies whose priorities no longer align with practical stability or performance needs.

"Our industry is rotting from its core," Hall wrote. "Developers have surrendered an extraordinary amount of control." He added that more frameworks like Brutal will follow as the cost of building alternatives drops, giving teams the ability to fork and walk away if the creators themselves become unaccountable.