It was not long ago that Housemarque announced on the back of poor sales for Nex Machina: Death Machine and Matterfall that they would abandon their focus on arcade shooters and move in a different direction. It's not just a change of genre, but the studio that has famously built games using their own engines has also opted to go for Unreal Engine 4 for their next project, in fact, going forward it is their engine of choice.
"Throughout our 22 years, Housemarque has taken pride in building our own proprietary technology to build the games that we want to play. Our summer 2017 release - Matterfall bucked that trend and was the first Housemarque release to use Unreal 4", said Ilari Kuittinen, CEO of from Housemarque. "We have made the decision to use Unreal Engine 4 exclusively going forwards. Unreal 4 enables fast prototyping, contains modern pipelines and editors for artists and designers and provides really valuable documentation and support forums. Plus, it's still very customizable so we can still use our award-winning rendering and visual effects tech with the engine. We've got some exciting stuff in the works!"
Exactly what this exciting stuff is remains to be seen, but clearly the end of arcade shoot 'em ups isn't the end of Housemarque and hopefully they will find the same sort of success in new genres.