Dean Hall, the developer who turned a zombie survival mod into one of the most influential games of the last decade with DayZ, released an open-source game-development framework called Brutal on October 15, 2026. The announcement came from Ahwoo and RocketWerkz, the two studios Hall is tied to, and it lands as a direct challenge to the commercial terms set by Unity and Epic’s Unreal Engine.
Brutal is written in C# and is free to use, including in commercial games, according to the announcement covered by GamesIndustry.biz. It’s one of the more consequential pieces of gaming industry news this week precisely because it touches the tooling every studio depends on, not just one game. There are no royalties attached. The only condition is attribution: developers must credit Brutal in their game’s copyright notice. That single clause separates it from nearly every major commercial engine on the market and from most “free” tiers that convert into revenue shares once a studio starts making money.
What Brutal Actually Is — and What It Isn’t
The framing matters here. Brutal is not being sold as a drop-in replacement for Unity or Unreal Engine. It’s a framework, not a complete engine, and that distinction shapes everything about who will actually use it. A framework gives developers lower-level building blocks (rendering hooks, interop between C# and native code, basic physics plumbing) without the editor, asset pipeline, or production tooling that a full engine ships with out of the box. Studios that adopt Brutal are signing up to build more of their own tooling, not less.
In a post describing the release, Hall said: “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.” That’s the pitch in one sentence: Brutal exists so a studio with the engineering muscle to build a custom engine doesn’t have to start from a blank C# file.
Work on Brutal reportedly began back in 2022, years before Wednesday’s public release, according to the announcement. That gestation period tracks with how long it typically takes to get a C#-based rendering and interop layer stable enough to ship real, revenue-generating games on top of it, rather than a tech demo.
The Companies Behind the Release: Ahwoo and RocketWerkz
Brutal comes from a partnership between Ahwoo and RocketWerkz, the New Zealand-based studio Hall leads. RocketWerkz has spent years building games that push into technically demanding territory, and that internal pressure appears to be exactly why Brutal exists: a studio needing control over low-level systems eventually has to build that control itself, and Ahwoo and RocketWerkz chose to publish the result rather than keep it in-house.
Releasing a framework publicly, with source code attached, is a different move than open-sourcing a finished game or a tool nobody else needs. It’s a bet that other studios facing the same technical constraints will adopt Brutal rather than build their own version from scratch or license an existing commercial engine.
Why C# Is the Interesting Technical Choice
Building a performance-sensitive framework in C# is a notable decision. C# is the language most working game developers already know, largely because Unity trained a generation of them on it. Unreal Engine, by contrast, leans on C++ and Blueprints. By building Brutal in C# with an interop layer down to native and high-performance libraries, Ahwoo and RocketWerkz are lowering the switching cost for any studio currently thinking in Unity terms but tired of Unity’s commercial strings.
RocketWerkz described the technical core of the project in blunt terms, saying the framework “takes the latest C# and the Vulkan graphics API and makes this available to the team.” That combination (modern C# plus direct Vulkan access) is what lets a studio skip years of plumbing work and get straight to building the parts of an engine that are actually specific to their game.
The studio was equally direct about the framework’s priorities, noting that the Brutal name “is very deliberate as it eschews usability in favor of performance, stability and quality.” That’s a pointed line. It tells you Brutal is not chasing beginner-friendliness the way Godot or Unity’s visual scripting tools do. It’s built for teams that already know what they’re doing and want fewer layers between their code and the hardware.
The Licensing Terms, in Plain English
The terms are short enough to state without a lawyer. Brutal is free, including for commercial games. There’s no royalty, no revenue share, and no seat license. The only requirement is attribution: a Brutal copyright notice in the game’s credits.
Hall addressed the commercial terms directly in comments reported by Eurogamer: “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.” He went further on the royalty question specifically: “There are no royalties and we don’t want a percentage of your game’s revenue.”
That second line is the one that will get quoted the most, because it’s a direct shot at the model Unreal Engine runs on, where successful titles owe Epic a cut once revenue crosses a threshold. Unity, after its 2023 runtime-fee controversy, has spent two years rebuilding trust with developers over exactly this kind of pricing anxiety. Brutal’s zero-royalty, zero-seat-fee structure is a deliberate contrast, not an accident of licensing paperwork.
Who’s Already Shipping With Brutal
According to the announcement, Brutal was already in use across six projects spanning three studios before the public release. Only two of those have been named: RocketWerkz’s own Kitten Space Adventure, which uses Brutal directly, and Waylith, the custom engine Ludeon Studios built on top of Brutal for its long-running hit RimWorld.
Waylith is the more telling example of the two. Ludeon didn’t just plug Brutal into an existing project; it used the framework as the foundation for building its own engine. That’s the use case Hall described when he talked about giving developers the option to build a custom engine “without having to spend four years building the foundations first.” Ludeon apparently decided a custom engine was worth the investment once the foundational work was already done for them.
| Studio | Project / Engine | Relationship to Brutal |
|---|---|---|
| RocketWerkz | Kitten Space Adventure | Built directly on Brutal |
| Ludeon Studios | Waylith (custom engine for RimWorld) | Custom engine built on top of Brutal |
| Unnamed third studio | Not disclosed | One of six total projects reported using Brutal; not publicly identified |
The gap in that table is deliberate. The announcement states six projects across three studios are using Brutal, but only two studios and two projects have been named publicly so far. That’s worth tracking: if the remaining projects surface in the coming weeks, it will say a lot about how far outside RocketWerkz’s immediate orbit Brutal has already traveled.
Dean Hall’s Broader Criticism of the Engine Market
Brutal’s release didn’t happen in a vacuum. It arrived alongside pointed comments from Hall about the state of the industry’s two dominant commercial engines. Game Developer reported on the framing directly, covering Hall’s argument that studios building their own technical foundations, rather than renting someone else’s, represent where the industry needs to head. The outlet’s coverage centered on the idea that frameworks, not monolithic engines, are the future of game development, a framing that lines up with exactly what Brutal is trying to prove.
That critique landed internationally too. Russian gaming outlet ixbt.games covered the same remarks under a headline describing the industry as rotten to the core due to game companies’ greed, underscoring how far Hall’s comments traveled beyond the usual English-language trade press within hours of the announcement. Whether or not every studio agrees with that framing, the speed and spread of the coverage shows Brutal’s launch was read as a statement about engine economics, not just a routine open-source drop.
DayZ, RocketWerkz, and the Track Record Behind Brutal
Context matters for why anyone is paying attention to a framework release from a studio most gamers know for survival games. Hall built his reputation on DayZ, the zombie survival title that reshaped what the open-world survival genre looked like and influenced a decade of competitors. He later founded RocketWerkz, where the studio has continued building technically ambitious projects, including the space simulation title Kitten Space Adventure that now runs directly on Brutal.
That history gives Brutal more credibility out of the gate than a framework from an unknown studio would get. RocketWerkz isn’t a tooling vendor trying to sell developers on a theoretical product; it’s a studio that needed this exact technology to ship its own ambitious games, and built it because nothing on the market fit a large-scale simulation project cleanly. Listings on RocketWerkz’s own careers page specifically call for C# programmers, a detail that lines up with Brutal’s technology choices and suggests the studio is still hiring into the systems that underpin the framework.
How Brutal Stacks Up Against Unity, Unreal, and Godot
Brutal doesn’t compete feature-for-feature with any of the three dominant engines in the market, and that’s the point. Unity and Unreal Engine are complete, editor-driven production environments. Godot is a complete open-source engine as well, with its own editor and scene system. Brutal skips the editor entirely and hands developers a lower-level foundation instead, which means the comparison is really about what kind of studio each option serves.
| Technology | Category | Primary Language | Royalty / Revenue Share | Editor Included |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brutal | Open-source framework | C# | None (attribution required) | No |
| Unity | Commercial engine | C# | Seat/subscription-based pricing | Yes |
| Unreal Engine | Commercial engine (source-available) | C++ / Blueprints | Revenue share above a threshold | Yes |
| Godot | Open-source engine | GDScript / C# / C++ | None | Yes |
Readers who want the exact current pricing and royalty figures for Unity, Unreal, and Godot can find the breakdown in our Unreal Engine vs Unity vs Godot comparison, since those commercial terms shift periodically and deserve their own dedicated treatment rather than a rough summary here. What’s stable, and what matters for this story, is the structural gap: Brutal asks for credit, not cash, and gives up the editor to get there.
Godot is the closest philosophical cousin to Brutal, since both are open-source and royalty-free. But Godot ships as a ready-to-use engine aimed at a broad range of teams, including smaller and solo developers who want a finished editor on day one. Brutal is explicitly not trying to serve that audience. It’s aimed at studios with the engineering staff to build their own tooling on top of a stable foundation, which is a much narrower slice of the market but one with real production needs that Unity and Unreal don’t always serve cheaply.
Market Impact: Who Actually Benefits From This
The honest answer is that Brutal’s immediate audience is small. A framework that trades usability for performance and ships without an editor isn’t going to pull casual Unity users or small indie teams away from engines built specifically to lower their technical overhead. The studios most likely to adopt Brutal are ones already considering building a custom engine, the kind of decision that usually only makes sense for teams with specific, demanding technical requirements and the staff to match.
That’s a smaller pool than Unity’s or Unreal Engine’s user base, but it’s not a trivial one. Mid-size and large studios building live-service games, simulation titles, or anything with unusual technical demands regularly weigh whether licensing fees and royalty structures are worth avoiding by building in-house. Brutal lowers the cost of that decision meaningfully, since it removes years of foundational engineering that would otherwise need to happen before a studio even starts on the parts of an engine specific to its own game. That calculation matters even more at a moment when the broader industry is already absorbing heavy layoffs across development studios, which makes any tool that cuts years off a production timeline worth a second look.
There’s also a signaling effect worth watching. Epic and Unity have both faced public friction with developers over pricing changes in recent years, and a credible, free, no-royalty alternative built by a studio with Hall’s reputation adds pressure on both companies to justify their commercial terms. It doesn’t need to win mass adoption to do that; it just needs to exist as a visible option that studios can point to in negotiations or public commentary.
The Open-Source Engine Landscape Brutal Is Entering
Brutal isn’t arriving into an empty field. Open-source and alternative engine tooling has been a live topic across the industry all year, from engine migration stories to royalty-model disputes. RocketWerkz’s own history of releasing Kitten Space Adventure as a free pre-alpha with optional donations already signaled a pattern of experimenting with alternatives to standard monetization, and Brutal extends that pattern from a single game to a reusable piece of infrastructure other studios can build on.
Other recent engine moves in the industry, including studios shifting between Unreal Engine versions or rebuilding custom tech for specific genres, show that engine choice has become a genuinely active decision point rather than a settled default. Studios like Jagex, which rebuilt its MMO technology on Unreal Engine after decades on proprietary tech, demonstrate that even long-established studios are willing to make large engine bets when the existing stack stops serving their needs. Brutal is a bet in the opposite direction: instead of adopting a bigger commercial engine, it’s a bet on going smaller and more custom. The underlying rivalry between the two biggest commercial options hasn’t slowed down either, with Unreal Engine and Unity still trading market-share figures and Unity continuing to push updates like the one covered in our Unity 7 reveal coverage, a reminder that Brutal is entering a market where the two incumbents are still actively competing for the same developers it’s trying to win over.
What Attribution-Only Licensing Means for Developers
The attribution requirement deserves more scrutiny than a one-line mention. Unlike royalty-based licenses, which scale with a game’s success, an attribution requirement is a fixed, one-time cost: a line in the credits, a logo, a notice file. That structure removes the awkward conversation that comes with royalty engines, where a studio’s obligations change as a game becomes more or less successful, and replaces it with a flat, predictable requirement that doesn’t shift no matter how a game performs commercially.
For studios that have been burned by license terms changing after a game is already in production (a complaint that defined much of the Unity controversy in recent years) a fixed, publicly stated set of terms is itself a selling point, independent of the technology underneath it. Predictability has become a competitive feature in the engine market, not just a technical one.
Risks and Open Questions
None of this means Brutal is risk-free for adopters. Open-source frameworks maintained primarily by a single studio carry a dependency risk: if RocketWerkz’s priorities shift, or if Ahwoo scales back investment in Brutal’s development, outside studios building on it inherit that uncertainty. Long-term support, documentation quality, and how actively outside contributions get reviewed and merged will determine whether Brutal becomes genuine shared infrastructure or stays mostly an internal RocketWerkz tool that happens to be public.
There’s also the honest limitation Hall and RocketWerkz have been upfront about: Brutal isn’t trying to be easy to use. A framework that explicitly prioritizes performance and stability over usability is, by design, a harder on-ramp than Unity’s editor or Godot’s scene system. That’s a feature for the studios it’s built for, but it also caps how wide its adoption can realistically get, regardless of how generous the licensing terms are.
Five Predictions for Where Brutal Goes Next
- More of the six reported adopter projects will likely be named publicly in the weeks following the release, as studios using Brutal get comfortable discussing their tech stack now that it’s a public framework rather than an internal tool.
- Expect scrutiny of Brutal’s documentation and contributor process as outside developers start evaluating whether it’s a one-studio project wearing an open-source license or a genuinely community-maintained framework.
- Unity and Epic are unlikely to change their commercial terms in direct response to Brutal alone, but expect both companies’ messaging around developer-friendly pricing to reference free and open alternatives more explicitly in upcoming announcements.
- Adoption will concentrate among mid-size and larger studios with existing engineering capacity, not solo developers or small indie teams, given Brutal’s framework-not-engine design and its stated preference for performance over usability.
- Hall’s public criticism of the big commercial engines will keep generating coverage independent of Brutal’s technical merits, since his comments about industry “greed” and accountability are already getting picked up by outlets well beyond the usual English-language trade press.
Why This Story Matters Beyond One Framework Release
Engine economics have become one of the more contentious threads running through game development over the past few years, from Unity’s runtime-fee reversal to ongoing debate over Unreal Engine’s royalty structure. Brutal doesn’t resolve that debate, and it’s not trying to replace either engine for most studios. What it does is give a specific, technically credible alternative to studios willing to trade an editor for full control, and it does so with licensing terms simple enough to summarize in two sentences: free to use commercially, no royalties, just credit where it’s due.
That simplicity is itself a message to the rest of the industry. Whether or not Brutal becomes widely adopted, it sets a visible, public benchmark for what a no-strings-attached commercial license actually looks like, one that other engine makers will now be implicitly compared against.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Brutal?
Brutal is an open-source game-development framework released by Ahwoo and RocketWerkz on October 15, 2026. It is written in C# and is designed to let developers either build games directly on top of it or use it as the foundation for a custom game engine.
Is Brutal a game engine?
No. Brutal is described as a framework rather than a complete engine. It does not ship with an editor or full production tooling the way Unity, Unreal Engine, or Godot do. Developers can build directly on Brutal or use it as the base layer for their own custom engine.
Who created Brutal?
Brutal was developed by Ahwoo in collaboration with RocketWerkz, the studio founded by Dean Hall, the creator of DayZ. Development on the framework reportedly began in 2022.
Does Brutal cost money to use?
No. Brutal is free to use, including for commercial games, with no royalties or revenue share required. The only requirement is attribution: developers must include a Brutal copyright notice in their game’s credits.
What games currently use Brutal?
According to the announcement, Brutal is already used in six projects across three studios, though only two have been publicly named: RocketWerkz’s Kitten Space Adventure, which uses Brutal directly, and Waylith, the custom engine Ludeon Studios built on Brutal for RimWorld.
How is Brutal different from Unity or Unreal Engine?
Unity and Unreal Engine are full commercial engines with editors and production tooling, and both carry fees or royalty structures. Brutal is a free, open-source, attribution-only framework without an editor, aimed at studios willing to build more of their own tooling in exchange for not paying royalties or license fees.
Why did Dean Hall release Brutal as open source?
Hall has said the goal is to give developers the option to build their own engine foundation without spending years on the groundwork first. The release also coincided with public criticism from Hall of what he described as accountability and incentive problems at large commercial engine makers.
Is Brutal good for beginner or solo developers?
Probably not the primary audience. RocketWerkz has said the framework prioritizes performance, stability, and quality over usability, and it lacks the editor and onboarding tools that engines like Godot or Unity provide for newer developers.