DayZ creator Dean Hall still hasn't solved survival gaming's endgame problem — and fears he never will

Dean Hall, the modder who created DayZ and helped define the survival genre, says making that game felt like dying — it ended his old life and changed every relationship he had. Fourteen years later, he's still chasing the feeling it gave him, and still hasn't found it.

The core problem Hall is hunting is one every survival game fan recognises: the endgame falls apart. Players run out of things to do, the loop gets stale, and no studio has cracked a real solution. Hall says the industry's default fix is brute-forcing it with more content, which he doesn't accept as an answer. His studio RocketWerkz has spent over a decade and multiple projects trying to crack it — and came close to bankruptcy in the process. Stationeers, a space-station construction game inspired by Space Station 13, launched in Steam Early Access in 2017, built up seven years of losses, and only roughly broke even in 2025. Icarus, a free-to-play online survival game, followed and found more commercial traction, but Hall still doesn't consider the problem solved.

Hall's background is worth understanding here. He doesn't think of himself as a game developer who came up through modding — he says he's a modder who makes games during the day. His co-op ArmA 2 mod was popular enough on the fansite Armaholic to land him a job at Bohemia Interactive, where DayZ grew from a personal mod into a commercial phenomenon. He left Bohemia in 2014, founded RocketWerkz, and has been restless ever since. He still mods games like RimWorld and Barotrauma in his spare time and tells aspiring developers that modding teaches you faster than building games from scratch.

Hall is candid that he may never solve the problem he's defined his career around. "I think I am going to die without having solved it," he says — though RocketWerkz is at least finding its footing commercially after years of struggle. Whether that counts as progress depends on what you think Hall is actually building toward.