It’s been a pretty busy news week for Eve Online maker CCP Games. It started with the company breaking away from its Korean owner Pearl Abyss, which acquired the firm in 2018. Then, CCP announced it was rebranding as Fenris Creations.
CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson says the notion of going independent again had been in the pipeline for “two or three years,” and it resulted from Pearl Abyss and CCP simply being too busy with their respective focuses – Eve Online and Crimson Desert – to realise the shared vision they had when the deal was done.
“When we did the partnership, we had plans to do stuff together – synergies, mergers, and things like that,” Pétursson explains. “Since then, we have never really got into it. They have been very busy with Crimson Desert, which is obviously an extraordinary game. We, of course, have been doing Eve Online, Frontier, and Vanguard. As we kept along those paths, we started to talk about whether this was the best configuration for both companies. We were sailing in the night, going our separate ways. Last year, we got more serious about it and parted ways as friends. We might collaborate in the future. We still have that shared aspiration of maybe doing something when we are less busy, whenever that will happen.”
One thing of note in terms of this week’s management buyout is the sheer difference in valuations between now and eight years ago. Back in 2018, Pearl Abyss bought CCP in a deal worth $225 million in cash plus $200 million in performance-related payouts.
When CCP bought itself back, the valuation was just $120 million – $100 million in cash and another $20 million in crypto (Fenris Creations PR has confirmed to GamesIndustry.biz that this is $EVE, “the in-game utility token associated with Eve Frontier, used to support its in-game ecosystem”).
Despite the massive difference, Pétursson says there isn’t much to read into these figures; they just show how different the market is now compared to 2018.
“It’s very much the ebb and flow of market conditions,” he says. “Game companies, including Pearl Abyss, were very differently valued in 2018 than they are now. It’s very much an expression of that.”
What’s in a name?
The other huge bit of news to come out of CCP Games is that, well, it isn’t CCP Games anymore: the company has rebranded to Fenris Creations. One has to question the logic of losing such an established name – CCP has been around for almost 29 years – but it turns out there is a good reason for the moniker switch.
“It is an interesting journey of the brand collision between Crowd Control Protections and the Chinese Communist Party,” Pétursson says. “That is a growing collision. It’s a fight I’m not going to fight. I’m not going to fight the Chinese Communist Party over who is the CCP. Obviously, the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t think of itself as the CCP. That’s a Western construct. They refer to it by a Chinese name. They’re not called the Chinese Communist Party in Iceland either; we call it the Kommúnistaflokkur Kína in Icelandic.
“But in the English-speaking world, we have increasingly had problems. I have seen reporters write stories about us where we are literally referred to as ‘the other CCP’. We have CCP employees going to the US and being questioned over the name. These are not big things, but I can sense where this is going. We were already making all these changes. It’s a good time to do it; if we don’t do it now, will we ever?”
The Fenris name, Pétursson explains, has a deep connection to both the company and Icelandic culture.
“In 1998, CCP published a board game called Hættuspil (Danger Game) under the Fenris name. And Fenris is a big part of Norse mythology. It is the Viking way to talk about the second law of thermodynamics, about entropy,” he says. Fenris, or Fenrir, is a monstrous wolf that has a key role in Ragnarok, the apocalypse.
“Fenris Creations is a reference to destruction and creation and how they are intertwined, how death is a serious matter in Eve Online. When ships explode, there’s something beautiful in destroying them. There’s some deep, hardcore meaning behind the name for us. We dug deep into what the best way to express what we do was.”
Dabbling with DeepMind
Alongside the Fenris rebrand came news that Google’s AI-focused DeepMind division had invested in the company, as well as forming a research partnership with the Eve maker. Pétursson explains that this is a logical step in DeepMind’s trajectory.
“First, you have DeepMind beating Kasparov in chess, then we have AlphaGo and Move 37, DeepMind actually did AlphaStar for StarCraft,” he says. “If you follow that line, what is the ultimate game? Eve Online. I know I’m blowing my own horn here, but I don’t think many people are going to dispute that concept.”
When it comes to AI and Fenris, there’s an element of acceptance. Pétursson says that the technology has entered the world with “rather decisive force” and that it is already being used extensively within the alliance infrastructure surrounding Eve Online. Kristinn Þór Sigurbergsson, director of gameplay engineering, previously told GamesIndustry.biz that the company uses “AI tools extensively in code-related work” as part of a feature on AI coding for GI’s AI Week.
“There are just a lot of ways that this is going to come to us whether we like it or not,” says Pétursson. “It’s just going to happen. I would rather be at the table than on the menu when it comes to these things. We see DeepMind as a great way to figure this out collectively; what does this mean with artificial intelligence gaining agency in our world, whether it’s on planet Earth or a dystopian sci-fi simulation like Eve Online. We see that as a fruitful ground to figure out things like an amazing partner like DeepMind.”
“I would rather be at the table than on the menu when it comes to these things”
Moving forward, the focus for Fenris Creations, unsurprisingly, is Eve. The studio’s flagship product, the long-running Eve Online, is now 23 years old. At this point in the life of an MMO, companies can take a few different paths; for example, RuneScape maker Jagex has adopted an approach of spring cleaning to appease existing fans, while making the new player experience a little more approachable. This is very similar to how Fenris is handling Eve Online in 2026.
“There’s a bit of spring cleaning. There’s a bit of taking care of new players. There’s a bit of adding content. We are always doing that,” Pétursson says. “The mix changes a bit. We have been building some formidable core systems and corporation projects like taking care of factional warfare, spring cleaning and enhancing and modernising the core systems so that players can set the agenda themselves even more. We will be slightly shifting over more to taking care of new players. But we are now planning our three-year expansion arc, focused on Theatres of War. There will also be a lot of improvements in the mechanics of how you conduct war in Eve Online – how you define victory conditions, and the user’s understanding of where the frontlines are. We’re investing in all those things.”
In addition to Eve Online, Fenris has two more strands to the long-running sci-fi IP. The first is Eve Frontier, a hardcore take on the MMO that is focused on survival in a more hostile part of the universe. It allows for player development, such as writing to the world state, as well as tackling botting and automation. There’s also the aforementioned cryptocurrency aspect, which Pétursson says helps “remove the currency controls of Eve Online”.
For a time, blockchain was a technology that games companies tried to jump on with limited success. That Fenris has persisted with Frontier is down to the company’s belief in the underlying technology.
“I’m not accusing my competition, but I think perhaps people maybe didn’t think about it to this level of depth, and maybe they were just jumping on a trend, which went away,” Pétursson says. “The underlying technology hasn’t changed. It’s neither good nor evil, cringe nor scammy. You can use tech for good and bad things. You can use steel to make a sword or the Eiffel Tower. It’s what you do with it that matters.”
Shared universe
The other new Eve game on the horizon is Vanguard, a title that picks up the mantle of 2013’s Dust 514. The idea for that game was to have a shared universe where shooter fans could affect the world of Eve Online, and vice versa. But Dust 514 received a mixed reception, and was discontinued in 2016.
However, the concept remained, and it has continued to be one of the most requested things on Fenris’s social media for years now.
“Everything that takes place in Vanguard affects the theatre of war inside Eve Online,” Pétursson says. “We wanted to have this way of adhering to two different game experiences that can still shape the future of the same universe. Imagine your next shot could dictate the political outcome of a universe for decades to come. It’s an extremely inspiring value proposition. It’s obviously batshit crazy to even attempt it, but we did in 2013 with Dust. We have continued to learn a lot, and god dammit, we’ll get it done.”
While sharing some DNA, Vanguard is a different beast from Dust 514. Fenris learned a lot from that older title and is taking those lessons forward.
“What we learnt was that we need to meet the market when it comes to shooter mechanics, the feel of the game and so on,” Pétursson explains. “Dust was our first shooter. We had some work to do. The platform choice of PlayStation 3… it took us a long time to fit such a big game on the hardware, which delayed the title in the console’s lifecycle. What we have now taken from that is that it is PC first, which we obviously know very well. We have spent a lot of time building a kickass shooter team in London to make sure we’re absolutely delivering on the gun feel, everything to do with the actual shooter mechanics and so on. Your next shot can topple an empire, and my god will that shot feel good when you fire it.”
Fenris Creations has a lot on its plate. For now, the company is still “always and eternally all-in on Eve” for the next five years at least. Pétursson is focused on pursuing the company’s grand ambitions for the series.
“I really want to realise the vision of the two games in one universe, and I really want to figure out this open modding, open economy for Frontier,” he says. “I really want, in the next five years, to deliver on both of those things. Once we have delivered on both pillars, who knows what concepts will emerge? Thinking beyond five years in the world today is… we’re almost beyond science fiction.”
He concludes: “Technology and science are moving so fast. Us having this interview on the moon in five years isn’t science fiction anymore.”
