After Silicon Studio abandoned its Xenko game engine and refused to transfer the trademark, the community renamed it to Stride to join the .NET Foundation. A corporate trademark held a community project hostage.
Stride is an open-source, cross-platform C# game engine built on .NET. It features physically-based rendering (PBR), a visual scene editor, prefab system, animation engine, physics integration (Bullet), and audio engine. It supports Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS deployment targets.
Xenko started life as 'Paradox' in 2014, a game engine built by Silicon Studio, a Japanese company known for graphics middleware. The engine was impressive — a C# game engine with physically-based rendering, a visual editor, and cross-platform support. It went through an awkward period as a commercial product (Xenko 2.0 in 2017 under a proprietary license) before Silicon Studio threw in the towel.
In August 2018, Silicon Studio announced they were dropping all support for the engine and relicensing it under MIT. The developer community, led by Virgile Bello (known as xen2), who had been the primary contributor, celebrated. They had a powerful, MIT-licensed game engine to build on. There was just one problem: the name.
Silicon Studio owned the 'Xenko' trademark, and as long as the project used that name, it couldn't join the .NET Foundation or operate with full legal independence. What followed was months of frustrating negotiations between Bello, the .NET Foundation's legal team, and Silicon Studio's legal department. The back and forth went nowhere — Silicon Studio wouldn't release or transfer the trademark, but they also weren't actively using the engine anymore.
In April 2020, the community bit the bullet and renamed the engine to Stride. The name was chosen to reflect forward momentum and avoid any trademark entanglements. The rename required touching almost every file in the codebase, updating documentation, rebuilding the community presence, and re-establishing SEO from scratch.
Stride continues as a community-driven C# game engine, positioning itself as the Unity alternative for developers who want to stay in the .NET ecosystem without vendor lock-in. It's a smaller project than Godot but has a dedicated following among C# game developers who appreciate its professional-grade rendering pipeline.
Engine first released as Paradox by Silicon Studio
Renamed to Xenko, launched as commercial product under proprietary license
Silicon Studio drops support and relicenses Xenko under MIT
Negotiations with Silicon Studio over trademark transfer stall repeatedly
Engine renamed from Xenko to Stride to escape trademark deadlock
Stride 4.0 released, first major version under the new name
Stride preserved a high-quality C# game engine that would have withered under the Xenko trademark deadlock. For C# game developers who don't want Unity's licensing terms or Godot's GDScript orientation, Stride remains one of the few viable options with a professional rendering pipeline.
The rename saga highlighted a common open-source trap: companies that open-source their code but retain the trademark can create indefinite legal limbo for community projects. Even with MIT-licensed code, you can't truly own a project if someone else owns the name.