A globally successful game studio could operate from anywhere with decent internet and a courier route. Dean Hall picked Dunedin. RocketWerkz has been building worlds from the bottom of the South Island for years now, and the question of why – and what it means for the city’s growing tech scene – turns out to be more interesting than the obvious answer.
The Guy Who Made DayZ Moved to Dunedin
Dean Hall’s Unusual Career Path
Most game developers don’t cite a New Zealand Army survival course as the moment everything clicked. But Dean Hall isn’t most game developers. Before he became the person behind one of the most influential PC games of the 2010s, Hall was a signals officer in the NZDF, deployed to places that were very far from comfortable. It was that experience – the real tension of managing scarce resources while things went sideways – that eventually became the DNA of DayZ), a mod for military sim Arma 2 that turned zombie survival into something genuinely punishing.
DayZ didn’t just find an audience. It created one. The mod racked up millions of players and effectively launched the survival game genre as a commercial category. Bohemia Interactive hired Hall to lead the standalone version, and for a while he was one of the most talked-about figures in gaming. Then he did something that surprised people: he left, came back to New Zealand, and set up his own studio. Not in Auckland. Not in Wellington. In Dunedin.
Why Not Auckland, Why Not Anywhere Else
It’s the first question everyone asks, and Hall’s been answering it for years. The short version: Dunedin gave him more of what mattered and less of what didn’t. Housing costs that let him put money into the studio rather than into a mortgage. An outdoor scene that matched how he actually wants to spend his time. A university that produces computer science graduates every year. And – though he’s usually too diplomatic to say it this directly – a city that leaves you alone to work.
Auckland would have offered a bigger talent pool and easier airport connections, sure. But it would also have meant competing with every other tech company for the same people, and paying Auckland rents for studio space. Dunedin’s smallness was the feature, not the bug. You can build a team here that’s genuinely committed to the place, rather than treating the job as a stepping stone to somewhere else. The trade-offs are real – winters that remind you the city sits at 46 degrees south, a small local market, the occasional feeling of being a long way from anywhere – but for a studio whose products are sold entirely online to a global audience, most of the supposed disadvantages don’t actually apply.
What RocketWerkz Actually Does
The Games They’ve Shipped
RocketWerkz doesn’t make the kind of games you’d see advertised during a rugby broadcast. Their output sits firmly in the systems-driven sandbox space – games where the rules create the stories rather than a scripted narrative doing the work for you.
Stationeers is probably their most representative title. It’s a space station building and management sim that rewards patience, engineering thinking, and a willingness to watch your entire atmosphere vent into space because you wired a pipe backwards. The community for it is dedicated, technically minded, and genuinely invested in the game’s ongoing development. It’s the kind of product that earns devotion rather than mass-market sales numbers, and RocketWerkz has leaned into that – maintaining the game through early access with regular updates rather than rushing to a polished 1.0 and moving on.
They’ve also worked on other projects that explore similar themes: survival, resource management, the pleasure of building complex systems in hostile environments. It’s a coherent studio identity, not a scattergun approach.
The Studio’s Working Culture
At last count, RocketWerkz had somewhere around 50-60 people on the team – a significant employer by Dunedin standards, and a notable concentration of specialised technical talent for a city this size. The team is a mix of locals, University of Otago graduates who stayed, and people who relocated from overseas specifically to work here.
That last group is worth pausing on. There are developers at RocketWerkz who moved to Dunedin from Europe, North America, and other parts of Asia-Pacific because a game studio in the South Island was making something they wanted to be part of. They’re people who could have worked in Melbourne, London, or San Francisco, and they chose a city of 130,000 at the bottom of the South Island. Some of them had never heard of Dunedin before the job listing. Several of them are still here years later, having bought houses and joined community groups.
The studio runs on a relatively flat structure, developer-led rather than management-heavy. Hall’s spoken publicly about wanting to avoid the crunch culture that dominates bigger studios – the expectation that people will burn through 60-hour weeks before a launch. Whether that holds up perfectly in practice is between the team and their calendars, but the stated intention matters in an industry that’s notorious for chewing people up.
Building Something That Doesn’t Look Like Dunedin
There’s something quietly funny about walking past the RocketWerkz office and knowing that inside, someone is constructing a pressurised habitat on a fictional moon, or debugging the atmospheric physics of a space station, while outside the window it’s raining sideways off the harbour and a seagull is fighting a chip packet on the footpath.
Dunedin doesn’t look like the worlds RocketWerkz builds. The games deal in hostile alien environments, the vacuum of space, the specific anxiety of watching your oxygen supply tick down. The landscape outside the studio is green hills, old stone buildings, and the kind of moody harbour light that photographers never shut up about. But maybe that disconnect is part of the point. You don’t need to live inside your subject matter to build it well – you just need the headspace to concentrate, and Dunedin has always been good at providing that.
Dunedin’s Quiet Tech Scene
More Than One Studio
RocketWerkz is the most visible name, but Dunedin’s tech scene doesn’t begin and end with game development. There’s a cluster of software companies, digital agencies, and startups spread across the city, many of them operating quietly enough that even locals don’t always know they’re there.
Companies like Animation Research Limited have been here for decades, doing broadcast graphics and sports visualisation work that’s been seen by millions of viewers worldwide – the kind of company that punches above its weight from a small office near the university. There are SaaS companies, fintech outfits, and a growing number of digital agencies serving clients well beyond the Otago region. The Startup Dunedin ecosystem connects early-stage companies with mentoring and investment networks, and co-working spaces like Petridish have given smaller operators a physical base.
None of this amounts to a tech hub in the way Auckland or Wellington might claim the label. But it’s a real thing – a genuine sector that employs people, exports services, and grows a little each year without making a fuss about it. Which, come to think of it, is a fairly Dunedin way to build an industry.
The University Pipeline
The University of Otago and Te Pukenga (formerly Otago Polytechnic) between them graduate hundreds of students every year in computer science, information science, design, and related fields. That pipeline matters enormously for companies like RocketWerkz – it means there’s a steady flow of people with relevant skills who already live here and know the city.
Otago’s computer science department has a solid reputation, and its information science programme has produced graduates who’ve gone on to work in tech companies around the world. The polytechnic’s design and digital media courses feed the creative side – the artists, animators, and UX designers that game studios need alongside the programmers.
The tension, though, is real. A significant number of those graduates still leave. Auckland, Melbourne, Sydney – the pull of bigger cities with more obvious career paths hasn’t weakened. What’s changed is that some graduates now have a reason to stay. When RocketWerkz posts a job listing, it’s not asking someone to relocate to Dunedin on faith – it’s offering a role at an established studio in a city the applicant already knows. That’s a different proposition entirely, and it’s one of the quieter ways a company like this changes a city’s prospects.
What a Game Studio Means for a Small City
The Ripple Effect
When a developer relocates from Berlin to Dunedin for a job at RocketWerkz, they don’t just show up at the office and disappear. They rent a flat, then buy a house. They find a cafe they like. They join a climbing gym or a running group. They bring a partner who needs their own work. Over time, they become part of the city’s fabric in ways that have nothing to do with game development.
Multiply that across 50-odd employees and you start to see what a studio like this does beyond its direct payroll. It adds population in the exact demographic most cities are desperate to attract: skilled, employed, earning above the median, and choosing to be here rather than defaulting to it. Dunedin doesn’t get many of those wins, and each one matters.
There’s a visibility effect too. RocketWerkz gets covered in international gaming press. Dean Hall speaks at conferences. When people in the global game industry hear “Dunedin, New Zealand,” some of them now have a reference point. That’s not going to transform the city’s economy on its own, but it shifts the conversation from “where?” to “oh, that’s where RocketWerkz is.”
The Limits of the Story
We should be honest about what one game studio can and can’t do. RocketWerkz employs 50-60 people in a city of around 130,000. That’s meaningful, but it’s not transformative in the way that, say, the university or the hospital are transformative. Dunedin’s core economic realities haven’t changed because someone’s making games here.
The brain drain is still real. Young people still leave for cities with more jobs, more variety, more direct flights to places that aren’t Christchurch or Auckland. The commercial flight schedule out of Dunedin Airport remains a source of quiet frustration for anyone trying to run a business with national or international connections. The distance from major markets means any Dunedin company exporting services carries a time zone penalty and a travel cost that companies in Auckland simply don’t.
None of that invalidates what RocketWerkz represents. But wrapping one company’s success in a narrative about Dunedin’s inevitable tech future would be doing exactly the kind of hype this site tries to avoid. What we can say is simpler and more honest: it’s proof that it’s possible. That counts for something.
Money on the Table
Game development is a global industry that generated something north of $180 billion in revenue in recent years. That’s more than film and music combined. And unlike a cafe or a retail shop, a game studio’s revenue doesn’t depend on local foot traffic. Every sale RocketWerkz makes – whether the buyer is in Seoul, Stockholm, or Sao Paulo – brings money into Dunedin from outside.
That export dynamic is worth paying attention to, because it’s the kind of economic activity that actually grows a small city’s tax base rather than just circulating existing money around the same pool. RocketWerkz isn’t taking a share of Dunedin’s spending – it’s adding to it. The salaries it pays get spent at local businesses, contribute to local rates, and support local services.
This isn’t a charity operation or a vanity project. It’s a commercial enterprise competing in a global market and choosing to do it from here. The fact that most of its customers couldn’t point to Dunedin on a map is almost the point – you don’t need to be in the market to serve it.
Still Here, Still Building
What’s Coming Next
RocketWerkz continues to hire, which is usually the most reliable indicator that a studio is working on something substantial. Job listings for Dunedin-based positions appear regularly, covering roles from programmers to artists to designers – the full spread of a studio in active production.
Hall has been characteristically guarded about specific upcoming titles, but he’s spoken openly about the studio’s broader ambitions: to push what’s possible in interactive simulation, to build games that create genuine emergent experiences rather than scripted ones. The technical direction leans into complex systems – the kind of game architecture where player actions have cascading consequences that even the developers can’t fully predict.
For Dunedin, the practical question is whether the studio keeps growing here or eventually outgrows the city. So far, every indication suggests the former. RocketWerkz has invested in its Dunedin presence, expanded its office space, and shown no sign of setting up a second location in a bigger market. That commitment isn’t guaranteed forever, but it’s held up longer than sceptics expected.
The Bet That Keeps Paying
Dean Hall could have set up anywhere. He had the profile, the track record, and the industry connections to build a studio in any city that would have him – and most of them would have. He chose Dunedin, and the choice keeps making sense in the most mundane, practical ways: the studio is stable, the team is growing, the games are shipping, and the people who work there seem genuinely content with where they live.
That’s not a heroic narrative. It’s a business decision that happened to align with a personal one, and both have worked out. Dunedin didn’t need saving by a game studio, and RocketWerkz didn’t need Dunedin to be anything other than what it already was: a small, affordable, manageable city with a decent university and a harbour you can see from the office window. Sometimes the best thing a place can do is just be itself and let people figure out that it’s enough.
RocketWerkz doesn’t prove that Dunedin is the next anything. It proves that Dunedin is already enough – for a studio that ships games to millions of players, for the developers who moved here from the other side of the world, and for a city that’s quietly better at this than it gets credit for. The worlds being built inside that office don’t look anything like the one outside the window. But the window’s view is the whole reason they’re being built here.