Stride (formerly Xenko) is a free and open-source, cross-platform C# game engine with a built-in visual editor, aimed at game developers who want realistic rendering and VR without buying a commercial engine licence.

What it is

Stride is a highly modular game engine written in C#, developed in the .NET ecosystem and shipped under the MIT licence. It includes Game Studio, a visual editor that lets you create and manage the content of your games or applications visually and intuitively, alongside a command-line toolchain for working without the editor. The project is designed around realistic rendering and VR, and its repository covers both the engine itself and the tooling used to build it, with published documentation, a roadmap, and a contributor community hosted on Discord.

The concrete problem Stride addresses is the cost and lock-in of commercial game engines for developers working in C# and .NET: it provides an editor, templates, a renderer, and an SDK lifecycle manager that a developer can install, version, and modify freely. It also solves the practical problem of project scaffolding and upgrades — stride sdk manages installed engine versions, stride new generates a project from a genre template, and stride upgrade moves an existing project to a newer engine version. In lineage terms it continues the earlier Xenko project under a new name, keeping the same open development model.

Key capabilities

• Ships Game Studio, a visual editor for creating and managing game content, launched with stride studio.
• Installs as a .NET global tool with dotnet tool install -g Stride.Cli, giving stride sdk install, stride sdk list, stride sdk uninstall, and stride sdk update for managing engine versions.
• Generates projects from templates with stride new fps -n MyShooter, covering templates such as game, fps, platformer2d, topdownrpg, and vrsandbox.
• Integrates with standard .NET templating through dotnet new install Stride.Templates.Games and dotnet new stride-game -n MyGame.
• Offers a template catalogue that includes genre starters, 18 feature demos, and tutorials, run with dotnet run --project MyShooter.Windows.
• Targets multiple rendering backends and platforms, with Direct3D and Vulkan among the tracked topics, alongside multi-platform support.
• Can be built from source with Git (including Git LFS) and Visual Studio 2026 using the .NET desktop development and Desktop development with C++ workloads.

Who uses it and how

• Game makers who prefer a visual workflow open Game Studio to assemble and manage game content, then build and run the Windows project directly.
• Developers who want to stay in the terminal use the Stride CLI to install engine versions, scaffold projects, and open the editor only when needed.
• Teams standardising on .NET templating create projects through dotnet new stride-game so that project creation fits existing dotnet tooling.
• Newcomers start from genre starters, feature demos, and tutorials rather than an empty project, then upgrade engine versions over time with stride upgrade.
• Contributors clone the repository, satisfy the documented prerequisites, and work on the engine itself, including funded tasks and bug bounties.

Getting started

Install the CLI with dotnet tool install -g Stride.Cli, run stride sdk install to fetch the engine, and scaffold a project with stride new; alternatively install the templates with dotnet new install Stride.Templates.Games, or clone the repository and build from source as described in docs/build/README.md.

How it compares

No commercial products this project replaces are named in the available facts, and no comparable engines are listed either, so Stride stands alone in this registry.

When to use it — and when not

Anyone building the engine from source must operate a Windows toolchain with Git and Git LFS enabled, Visual Studio 2026, and both the .NET desktop development and C++ desktop development workloads, with further optional components documented in docs/build/README.md. It is a poor fit for developers who need a purely visual, no-setup path or who are unwilling to work in C# and .NET, and the repository carries 683 open issues; note also that this README is explicitly aimed at people building from source and contributing, so newcomers creating games are directed to the separate get-started guide.

dotnet tool install -g Stride.Cli

stride sdk install                   # install the latest Stride engine
stride new fps -n MyShooter          # template: game, fps, platformer2d, topdownrpg, vrsandbox, ...
cd MyShooter && dotnet run --project MyShooter.Windows

stride studio                        # open Game Studio, the visual editor

dotnet new install Stride.Templates.Games
dotnet new stride-game -n MyGame
cd MyGame && dotnet run --project MyGame.Windows