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News Article source ↗ source url updated Wed Jul 01 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Carbon goes open source — why (Fenris Creations / CCP)

The open-sourcing of the Carbon engine, and the reasoning Fenris Creations / CCP gives for it. Tier T3 (primary vendor page + trade coverage). The transition, announced by CCP in March 2024 as a plan, is now complete — Carbon is fully open source under the MIT license at github.com/carbonengine.

Provenance note: the source the router received (gamesindustry.biz) was unfetchable (host block, not a transient error), so this page is sourced from the primary Fenris Carbon page plus trade coverage (Game World Observer, Shacknews) and the MIT license confirmed on the Carbon GitHub org — a substitution, not a drop.

Why open-source a live AAA MMO engine

CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson’s argument is about longevity through openness, not monetization:

  • Robustness over time. “If you look at the macro trends in software, generally code that is open and shared has a higher chance to be robust over a period of time” — citing Linux as the precedent. The goal he states plainly: let EVE Online “live forever” through community stewardship rather than depend on one studio indefinitely.
  • Community creativity. “When you give tools to people in a community, they will make awesome things… they will outdo your creativity way more than you think.” Concrete openings named: collaborating with universities, hosting game jams, and letting enthusiasts improve EVE or build entirely new games on Carbon.

Why it matters to this wiki

This is a distinctive data point on two of the spoke’s axes (synthesis):

  • Licensing — a AAA in-house engine joining the permissive (MIT) pole, not a royalty/subscription commercial model.
  • Origin story — the “formerly-proprietary → open-sourced” pattern gets a new sub-variant: opened while the game it powers is still live and commercially active (EVE Online is ~20 years old and still subscription-funded), motivated by stewardship/longevity rather than the post-abandonment salvage of torque2d (ex-GarageGames) or o3de (ex-Lumberyard). “Open-source as succession planning for a live service” is the framing.

Note the counter-move alongside it: CCP’s newer titles split engines — Project Awakening builds on Carbon, while the EVE Vanguard FPS uses Unreal — so open-sourcing Carbon doesn’t mean betting everything on it.

carbon-engine · fenris-creations · ccp-games · synthesis · torque2d · o3de

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