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Guerrilla Games' in-house engine — shared with Kojima Productions for Death Stranding and powering the Horizon series.
Decima was developed by Guerrilla Games (Sony first-party studio) for Killzone Shadow Fall (2013) and refined through Horizon Zero Dawn (2017), Horizon Forbidden West (2022), and Death Stranding (2019, 2025) after Hideo Kojima's Kojima Productions partnered with Guerrilla to use the engine. Its strengths are wide-open landscapes, dense foliage, dynamic weather, and high-fidelity character rendering. Decima is not commercially licensed — it is exclusively used by Sony first-party studios and Kojima Productions.
Example
Death Stranding (2019) was the first Decima game outside Guerrilla — Kojima Productions adapted the engine for its very different needs (long-distance traversal, environmental physics, asynchronous multiplayer) in roughly two years, an unusually fast cross-studio engine integration.
Why it matters
Decima is a model of internal-engine partnership across studios — Sony's strategy of letting Kojima use Guerrilla's tech rather than forcing a commercial engine demonstrates a different way to manage first-party technical resources.
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