DayZ creator: 'I am going to die' without solving survival gaming's biggest problem

Dean Hall, founder of RocketWerkz and creator of DayZ, has a confession: he may never solve the problem that has defined his career. "I think I am going to die without having solved it," Hall says of the survival gaming endgame problem, a puzzle that has consumed 14 years of his life, driven his studio to the brink of bankruptcy, and forced him to rethink how games are made and sold. The stakes are personal: "When DayZ happened, it was like dying. It ended my old life."

The problem is simple to state but brutal to solve: survival games get boring. "You see it time [and] again. If you go see commentary on a survival game, people will say it gets boring, or the end game sucks," Hall explains. The industry-standard fix is to "brute force it with heaps of content," a solution Hall despises for its crudeness, comparing it to "banging a nail in with a rock." It's a trap he fell into anyway.

Hall's journey from modder to studio head is a case study in the perils of success. Before DayZ, Hall was a modder at heart, having landed a job at Bohemia Interactive after his co-op mod for ArmA 2 became the most popular on the defunct fansite Armaholic. "People think I'm a game developer who came up from [being] a modder, and I would say I'm a modder who makes games during the day," he says. "I was born a modder and I will die a modder."

When DayZ exploded, it changed everything.