DayZ, Icarus, and Kitten Space Agency creator Dean Hall has issued a fiery assault against some of the world's biggest game companies, calling out a "greed" that's "rotting" our industry to its core. He took particular aim at engine-makers Epic (Unreal) and Unity, while simultaneously backing his words by launching an open-sourced, free alternative of his own: a game-making framework called Brutal.

"Our industry is rotting from its core," Hall wrote in an expansive post on Reddit, "outwards in every direction, and it has been for some time. Driven by greed, driven by a race to the bottom on price. It is my position that the games industry was already heading somewhere unsustainable before reverse-engineering and powerful agentic processes became widely available. These have pushed things over the edge.

"But I think one of the biggest problems is something we don't discuss enough. Developers have surrendered an extraordinary amount of control over their work to companies whose interests aren't necessarily aligned with their own. So we're doing something about it."

Brutal is a framework rather than a game engine, so it allows freedom to either make a game with it - as Hall's RocketWerkz studio has with Kitten Space Agency - or use another engine with it, like RimWorld's developer Ludeon has with its game engine Waylith.

"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," Hall wrote.

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