EVE Online evolution: insights from CCP Games' CEO on the future of the iconic space MMO
EVE Online needs little introduction. Created by Icelandic studio CCP Games, for over 20 years it’s been the poster child for the immersive, community-driven MMO scene.
Tons of development is taking place in the EVE universe now, with Project Awakening adding web3 components, and Vanguard taking players down to the planets’ surfaces for on-foot shoot-outs.
We sat down with CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson in San Francisco at the end of GDC week
for an in-depth chat about his philosophy and strategy, and where the company is headed.
Our chat covered everything from updates to EVE Online, the company's commitment to its long-term success, the development of Project Awakening and the incorporation of blockchain technology, the philosophical vision behind company decisions like open-sourcing their game engine, opportunities in the games industry generally, the challenges of onboarding new gamers, and loads more.
Well, nothing has changed. We’re not going to add it to TQ! We also said, specifically, we’re going to have a small tech team experimenting. If you go back to the announcement, it literally says that. We were doing experiments.
It was more on the eSports side in ’21. We were working with the team behind Tezos Blockchain. We were very impressed by the tech – and the tech is still impressive. And we were doing something to build an eSports experience on EVE that we were going to have XR and blockchain features. We were experimenting with these two things.
At the time, of course, there was a lot going on in blockchain. Let’s call it a mixed bag of stuff! And it made EVE players very angsty that we were going to change it all. That’s why we put out the statement. It’s like, “We hear you. That was never the plan. There’s no reason to change the database as it is (it’s actually a major surgery to do that). But we will continue to explore, and we have a small team which are going to carry that forward.”
And then last year we announced that that small team is now funded by
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