“There’s jobs, there’s careers and then there’s obsessions, and for me, game development is an obsession. I don’t think it’s healthy at all, but I am a brush, I must paint. So for me, I’ve reached the natural end of my arc where I’m just entirely about making video games, and I’m obsessed with wanting to make them better.”
That’s Dean Hall speaking, the New Zealander who created one of the world’s most popular survival games, DayZ. The last time I spoke to him properly was when he was about to leave DayZ. He was going to walk away from the game that made him and return to New Zealand to make a game studio of his own. He knew the news wouldn’t be welcomed openly by players. DayZ had only been out in early access for a few months when Hall announced he was going to leave. His crime: he wouldn’t be there to see development through. But galvanised by recent success, an invincible Hall didn’t mind.
He had a higher calling: to return home, throw money around, hire the right people, and make games a new way – his way. “Everything I touched would be gold and everything would be amazing,” Hall tells me now, in a video call, recalling how he felt back then. He bought a Lamborghini Aventador and featured it gratuitously in videos of his studio RocketWerkz, as if to underline his success, and posted pictures of it, and of himself looking ripped, across social media, like a lifestyle influencer would. The image he projected was one of absolute confidence. This plan of his would absolutely work. “And that’s not what happened,” he says. Today 11 years later, and one studio reboot – and some very near studio closures later – things have certainly changed.
At the heart of it all is Icarus, the co-op survival crafting game which prompted this interview and which, as of last night, we know will be coming to consoles – PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X – early next year. But that game’s been on a journey. It’s been around since 2021, and it was supposed to be Hall’s big return to the survival genre after DayZ. RocketWerkz had released other games before it, such as space station builder Stationeers and virtual reality strategy game Out of Ammo, but these were only precursors to what Hall really wanted to make – a big survival game. So, he restructured RocketWerkz to make it. He closed the original experimental office in sleepy Dunedin and relocated operations to the big city of Auckland and focused everything on making one, bigger, game.
Icarus isn’t a revolutionary idea. It’s a co-operative multiplayer game for as many as eight people, which involves landing on a planet a bit like Earth, but very much not Earth, and surviving there. Collect resources, build a base, craft equipment, stay alive – we’ve been here before many times. But this being Dean Hall – someone who nearly died in the army while on a survival exercise – means the game had to have deep and detailed survival systems, which marked it out as different, and complex building and upgrading systems, something else he tends to favour. Built in Unreal Engine 4, Icarus was handsome to look at, and after several successful beta weekends, the game launched in early access in December 2021 to a fair amount of excitement (~50,000 concurrent players). And then everything started to go wrong.
Performance issues, design issues, bugs – the game suffered a cocktail of problems. There was one particular bug that prevented you from playing in a language other than English, which understandably provoked a fierce reaction from people who didn’t want to play in English. “We were getting destroyed,” Hall says. And there was no other option than for RocketWerkz to fix it; with Icarus, everything was on the line. Hall’s funds, which had once felt inexhaustible, were rapidly depleting; Hall had originally sought a publisher for Icarus to no avail – some companies came close but were the wrong fit. And he’d sold as many shares in the company – with a chunk going to Tencent – as he was comfortable parting with. RocketWerkz was on the precipice.
Moreover, as far as the people playing Icarus were concerned, Hall was once again the bad guy. The taint of a rocky launch, which had followed him around since DayZ, and onto Stationeers, had now been reapplied by Icarus. Backlash was vociferous. But Hall was no stranger to it by now. “I had reached my own peace with it,” he says.
“I think about it like this: my worst day all through then to now was nothing compared to my worst days in the army.” If you don’t know, those days involved near-starvation and bodily shut-down, and Hall needing surgery to sort him out. It was grim. “So I can always look back on that,” he says. “I mean boohoo, I made this money and I’m running a video game studio and if I sneeze, a journalist is going to write an article about it. How many game devs would wish for that? I still get death threats, there’s still a lot of nonsense – I’m not saying that that’s acceptable or that’s not a big deal – but if I compare it to the ultimate insult, which is just absolute indifference, I think I’d take this.
“I still get death threats, there’s still a lot of nonsense…”
“What does really bother me is when it affects staff,” he adds. “That’s when it starts to really tick me off. Because sure, you can simultaneously have the weird position that ‘how dare I leave DayZ?’ and then at the same time that ‘I was terrible’. Well they can’t both be true. If I was really bad then surely it was a good thing for me to leave. But when it affects a big team of people…” That’s not on. “That’s what that taint is that follows me around,” he says, “much of which I don’t think is deserved at all. They don’t know me at all. It does bother me. But when Icarus came out, I was ready for it.”
He knew he had to win the community’s trust back, so he made a bold pledge to players to significantly update Icarus every week until the problems were turned around. Which was fine, and probably nice to hear, if you weren’t a developer tasked with doing it. “I copped a tremendous amount of flak from the team,” Hall says. “They were like it’s impossible, we can’t do this. And I was like: if we don’t do this, we’re dead.” And he meant it. Going under was “a definite possibility” during that period, he says. “We were close, definitely, and I realised we needed to change.”
Four years later, a lot has changed. The entire back-end of Icarus was ripped out and replaced, at great cost, because it prevented players from hosting their own servers, which is a part of the attraction of co-op survival games like this, and because it required players to be online to play – never a popular move. The river of weekly updates did run and run consistently, addressing the many issues as well as bulking the game out, and three expansions were released and a number of significant content updates besides.
Icarus recently reached its 200th weekly update, impressively – Hall assures me the studio doesn’t crunch – and perception around the game does seem to have changed. Icarus is regarded Mostly Positively on Steam today, which means nearly three quarters of the reviews are recommendations. Concurrent player-numbers have picked up – “we’re giving Dune [Awakening] a run for its money, which I’m enormously proud of,” Hall says – though there are still negative reviews and red-hued down-thumbs there. Their bugbear? DLC price.
If you were to buy all of the released paid Icarus content, you’d pay £140 for it. Even if you were to ignore all of the cosmetic additions and concentrate only on the expansions, you’d still pay £65, which when you consider the base game is £30, is a fairly hefty ask. You don’t need any of these additions to play Icarus, and there is an easy workaround Hall openly tells me about, whereby if anyone you’re playing with owns the DLC, everyone can play it. Nevertheless this pricing approach is unpopular. For Hall and RocketWerkz, though, it was unavoidable. They had to make money somehow, and the alternatives were monetisation methods Hall either doesn’t like or, in the case of gambling mechanics, is “disgusted” by. The Paradox model, as he calls it, was the least bad of the lot. “So I actually agree with people’s criticism,” he says.
“The last year-and-a-half or two years, I’ve actually really started to enjoy running a company. Before that, I hated it.”
Then he launches into a longer, more revealing explanation: “The last year-and-a-half or two years, I’ve actually really started to enjoy running a company. Before that, I hated it. I hated it with this burning passion, and I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me because again, I did fine out of DayZ and I got to run a game dev studio. You pay your money, you take some chances. But I really didn’t like getting up in the morning, and I realised I was the one person who couldn’t quit. I couldn’t just quit the studio – my name was on the door. Everyone else could leave but I would have to turn the lights out. So it was very hard and I didn’t like where it was going. You have people raging, customers upset. The studio has not made any money. All the money we’ve made has gone back into development; all of the money still goes back into development. Not a single dividend at all. But I can definitely see where customers are coming from.
“It’s very easy to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and essentially have just a couple of players and make a hundred thousand in revenue – nothing next to the cost of it. So we had to go with this model, and there’s no doubt the studio would have gone under if we didn’t move toward this. So I chose the Paradox model, where we do free updates – really big, meaty updates – but the majority, the vast majority of our DLC, is not only cosmetic but almost entirely unnecessary.” It’s a way for people to tip the developer and support development if they want to. “The only difference is the expansions, which were deliberate. They were designed to be almost the price of the game.” But they’re only there if you’ve played so much of Icarus you want more.
The good news for console gamers, like Dean Hall’s barber, apparently, is that some of this additional Icarus content will be included in their base game – namely the New Frontiers expansion released in 2023 (which costs £23 on PC). Czech Studio Grip – which helped make Mafia: The Old Country, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Midnight Suns and Conan Exiles, and more – is making it, and had the benefit of four years of Icarus development to cherry pick from. The only slight issue being that the difference in base games means there’ll be no cross-play. The console and PC versions of Icarus will be considered separate and be updated at different rates. However, it does finally mean proper controller support for all.
With increasing player numbers, a console version inbound, and a new expansion called Dangerous Horizons due either at the end of this year or early next, Hall tells me, Icarus appears to be rising. And as Hall says, “We’ve still got plans with it,” so work won’t end with the console version. Beyond that, RocketWerkz – a 70-person studio – is also working on a blatant successor to Kerbal Space Program, which has long been a love of Hall’s. He was even in the running to develop the official Kerbal Space Program 2, once upon a time, he tells me. “We made it into the top three and we lost out,” he says. But KSP2 turned out dreadfully and had RocketWerkz taken it on, we’d have no Icarus, so perhaps things worked out.
Hall and RocketWerkz’ current take on the KSP idea is called Kitten Space Agency, so as to keep the acronyms close, and to my rather uninitiated eye, looks as faithful to the original game as I think it’s possible to get. Dense, crunchy, complicated, though perhaps smarter visually speaking and less curved and cute, it’s very much the same thing. There’s also a small game about piloting and upgrading a submarine, called Torpedo, which is a bit like FTL and Rimworld apparently, that’s in the works.
“My whole life changed in the space of maybe a few months […] People don’t realise how disorienting that could be.”
Will Dean Hall ever remove the taint that follows him? As the old adage goes, you’re only as good as the last game you launched, which in Hall’s case was Icarus four years ago. Will Icarus on console be notable enough to have an effect? I’m not sure, and RocketWerkz hasn’t been the primary developer making it. Kitten Space Agency will be the true test, but I get the feeling that it will be opened up to play long before it’s considered watertight. Such is the way Hall seems to work. Regardless, things do seem to be turning around for him. Stationeers set its highest concurrent player count the other day, seven years after launch, and Icarus is in the ascendency. RocketWerkz is still here 10 years later and it’s stabilised. Moreover, Hall seems to have stabilised, to have settled down.
That Lamborghini he once owned? “I’ve sold it,” he says. “I never used it.” He sold the apartment he owned too, in favour of renting one five minutes from the office, which is where he always seems to be. That ripped influencer we saw on Instagram many years ago? That’s not who Dean Hall is any more – he calls his Instagram his “new money mood wall”, which makes me laugh, and the way he talks about it sounds like a somewhat unavoidable phase he had to go through.
“When you make a bunch of money, people don’t really realise… My whole life changed in the space of maybe a few months,” he says. “And it wasn’t even just like winning the lotto – it was so much more that came with it. And honestly I’m very proud that I made it through there. Luckily I don’t drink or do drugs. I think if those things were there, I would have really struggled. And then there’s all this ego struggle as well, because you think you’re amazing. It just happens. People don’t realise how disorienting that could be. So you’re going to make a tragic Instagram, you’re going to buy a stupid car. At least the damage that I did on those things was totally undoable.”
There haven’t been any updates to his Instagram in years because, as he says, “I’m sadly very boring. I’m just obsessed with making games.” That’s what all his money has been redirected into and what he spends all of his time doing now. No supercars, no social media, no climbs to the top of Everest. Hall has come back down to earth. And that’s where I leave Hall for now, 11 years after we last spoke, hoping I’ll speak to him a decade from now about how it all worked out. But will it? With Hall, you never quite know. But you can’t help listening all the same.
