While many studios prefer to license engines like Unreal Engine 5 to simplify the overall process of making games, Pearl Abyss made a conscious decision to go with its own in-house engine so that it could have better control over the features it wanted for Crimson Desert. In an interview with Mein MMO at Gamescom 2026, lead engineer Jin-hwan Kim said that the company didn’t want to be beholden to technology made by external companies for its projects.
“Since the Black Desert engine was developed in-house, it would have been unusual to switch to a commercial engine for the new Crimson Desert project. While commercial engines are excellent and offer many practical features, we didn’t want to rely on external technology for our core competencies in game development.”
“Furthermore, our development approach might not have been compatible with that of a commercial engine. If we had had to wait for updates to get the necessary features, we wouldn’t have been able to release the game on our desired schedule. Therefore, we wanted to maintain better control over the process.”
The studio went on to discuss how useful it has been for Pearl Abyss to have its own game engine – dubbed the Blackspace Engine – since it has been able to develop many bespoke features for it during the development of MMORPG Black Desert Online. Interestingly, this has also led to a lack of flexibility, since making games in other genres has become difficult due to the engine’s specialization.
“The Black Desert engine, for example, is so heavily specialized for Black Desert that it’s difficult to develop games of different genres with it, and its flexibility has diminished. With Blackspace, however, I took these aspects into account from the very beginning. Of course, it’s not perfect, but in my opinion, there’s really no reason to rebuild it from scratch. The most important aspect in developing the Blackspace Engine was seamless support for various platforms and the ability to create diverse games. Because we primarily started with the Blackspace Engine to create these diverse game worlds, I believe it will certainly be possible to develop, for example, FPS or TPS games.”
Making the appropriate decision when it comes to game engines tends to be one of the most crucial decisions any game development team can make, especially early on during the development cycle. While Unreal Engine has gone on to become one of the most popular engines out there, with even CD Projekt RED picking it up for the development of The Witcher 4, there are still major companies that have opted to continue development on their own in-house engines.
A major example of this could be seen with Capcom, which has been using its RE Engine since 2017’s Resident Evil 7. The engine was developed as a successor to the company’s MT Framework engine, which had started to show its age since it was originally created to develop games on PS3 and Xbox 360. More recently, Capcom has been able to build up RE Engine to be more flexible, allowing for a wide variety of projects to be developed, from survival horror experiences like Resident Evil Requiem to turn-based RPGs like Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection.
