On July 1, Fenris Creations, formerly CCP, completed a yearslong promise: its in-house Carbon Engine is now fully open source. The Carbon Engine repositories are available now on GitHub. The Carbon Engine is the tech behind long-running MMO EVE Online and early access space survival game EVE Frontier. And in a space where most engines stay private, this is a clean, concrete release with a clear artifact: the code is out.

This matters because Carbon is not “some prototype engine.” Fenris is using it in production for EVE Online and Frontier, meaning openness is not just a marketing gesture. In fact, Fenris has already shown it could follow through on its public commitments: when PC Gaming Show in late 2024 previewed Frontier, Fenris laid out a survival vision that included more action-oriented gameplay than EVE Online, one-of-a-kind server-side modding support, and open-sourcing the Carbon Engine. Less than two years later, the source says Frontier has dogfighting now, the mod scene is active and intriguing, and now Carbon is open source.

Zoom out for the industry context. Proprietary game engines are increasingly rare, at least compared to the era when most major studios tried to build a moat around their internal tech. The source points to CD Projekt and its Red Engine as an example of the opposite direction: even studios once defined by in-house engines have abandoned them in favor of Unreal. Unreal’s sixth iteration recently unveiled the first details, reinforcing the broader gravitational pull toward mainstream engine ecosystems. That shift is partly practical. If your tooling, hiring, and community knowledge concentrate around a dominant engine, your development cycles can speed up. But it also changes bargaining power. When your engine is closed, you are often tied to your own roadmap. When your engine is open, you can attract contributions, transparency, and scrutiny.

Fenris makes the picture more interesting because it is not putting all its eggs in the Carbon basket forever. The source notes that while EVE Online and Frontier are built on Carbon, Fenris's FPS project Vanguard is being built with Unreal. That split is a real strategic tell. Open-sourcing an engine does not automatically mean everything in the portfolio must run on it. Instead, it can function like an asset that the studio controls while also letting the broader community inspect, learn from, and potentially extend the tech, even if future projects migrate to different stacks.

There is also a credibility angle here, and credibility is a kind of currency in gaming technology. The source highlights that Fenris “repeatedly shown a capability and consistency in following through on its promises.” This is not a new studio making one bold claim. It has a track record of shipping major gameplay changes for Frontier and then delivering on the openness component on schedule. That consistency matters to players and to anyone making partner or platform bets, because open source is only as useful as the institution behind it. If releases stall, forks fork, and maintainers burn out, the promise becomes noise. Here, the release is explicit: completed July 1, on GitHub.

Finally, there is a bigger second-order implication for executives and boards: open sourcing can act like an operational risk hedge in a world drifting toward closure. The source ties this to the broader “drift of tech” toward proprietary lock-in and cites Aftermath calling the Steam Machine an “iconoclastic” device for its commitment to open, customizable computing. You can read the Carbon move the same way: Fenris is choosing openness in an environment where the default is to keep your core systems behind walls. That choice can influence how developers perceive the studio, how tooling ecosystems form around your work, and how long-term maintenance can be shared.

For peers making engine and platform decisions, the strategic stakes are clear. Fenris just demonstrated a path where a studio can own the story of its underlying technology, release it for scrutiny, still ship live games, and run a separate future FPS project on a different engine. If you are leading a studio, an investor backing one, or a board member weighing long-term tech risk, this is the kind of move that can reshape internal debates: build moats with proprietary code, or convert your engine into shared infrastructure and reduce single point of failure.