Monday, May 11, 2026

From CCP to Fenris Creations: EVE Online enters the Age of AI

 

What a time to be an EVE player!

When the news dropped Wednesday last week, I wanted to sit down and start writing immediately. CCP Games rebranding as Fenris Creations. Entering a research partnership with Google DeepMind. Damn!! But the hot take is rarely the right take. So I shut up, read everything I could find, and gave myself a few days to let it settle.

It's been nearly a week since the news dropped, and this is where I'm at three days before Fanfest starts: I'm excited. And I'm eager to learn more when DeepMind founder Adrian Bolton takes the stage alongside Hilmar at Fanfest later this week, even though I won't be there in person.

I've also been following EVE's development since the late nineties, which means I know how to be excited and skeptical at the same time. I've had practice.

So buckle up folks, cause Kansas is going bye-bye, as this is going to be a "DeepDive" into the biggest EVE news in years. Pun very much intended!

So what actually happened?

Three things, announced simultaneously, which is probably why the coverage has been a mess of conflicting headlines.

First, and this is the part most outlets led with, CCP Games is no more. The studio rebranded as Fenris Creations. The name is a callback to CCP's first published game in 1997, which is a nice bit of continuity.

Second, the management buyout from Pearl Abyss is complete. We've known this was in motion since April 30th. Hilmar and the team own the company again. Birgir Már Ragnarsson, CCP co-founder, takes the Board Chair. After eight years under Pearl Abyss, the studio is Icelandic-owned and independent. That matters more than people realize.

Third, and this is the part I keep coming back to, Google DeepMind has taken a minority stake and entered a research partnership with the newly independent studio.

Most of the press treated the rebrand as the headline. Don't be fooled. The rebrand branding, important yes, but something bigger is brewing: the DeepMind deal is the story.

Why pick our game?

Hilmar told Engadget: "We jokingly say that the final boss for AI in games would obviously be EVE Online."

I know how that sounds. Every studio thinks their game is special. But sit with this for a second, because the people at DeepMind aren't idiots, and they specifically picked EVE Online, with its unique single shard gameplay environment, for specific reasons.

DeepMind has spent fifteen years burning through game environments. Atari. Go. StarCraft II. 3D open worlds. They've beaten all of them. AlphaStar was impressive, but its longest StarCraft match lasted about thirty minutes. EVE wars unfold over months. Sovereignty campaigns require logistics and patience that operate on timescales AI has never had to deal with.

And that's just the easy part.

Your reputation in 2026 was earned in 2014. Alliances remember betrayals from a decade ago. There's no session reset. No clean slate. Memory isn't a feature of New Eden, it's the foundation the whole thing sits on. AlphaGo never had to lie convincingly. In EVE, the metagame is reading other humans: their bluffs, their grudges, their tolerance for risk. Diplomacy and espionage aren't edge cases. They're the game.

ISK persists. Lose a Titan, it's gone forever. Tens of thousands of pilots with conflicting goals, all operating simultaneously. Two to three hundred thousand monthly active players generating 23 years of behavioral history.

That's not a benchmark. That's a civilization.

Adrian Bolton said it himself: EVE "requires skills that AI has not yet fully mastered," specifically long-term planning and continual learning. Alexandre Moufarek, a Director at Google DeepMind, called it "a one-of-a-kind simulation for testing general-purpose artificial intelligence."

We've been saying for years that EVE is unlike anything else in gaming. Now the people who built AlphaGo are saying it too.

Okay but what does this mean for the game?

This is the part I care about most, and it's the part with the least detail so far.

The partnership will run on an offline version of EVE, hosted on a local server, firewalled from Tranquility. Our live game isn't the lab. That's the line Hilmar is drawing, and for now, it holds.

The press release promises "new gameplay experiences" and "insights" flowing back to EVE Online from the research. That's deliberately vague. Nobody, not Hilmar, not DeepMind, is committing to specifics yet. Bolton on the Fanfest stage later this week is where we'll find out if this is a real roadmap or a mood board.

I'll be honest, I'm a tad concerned about how DeepMind's involvement might eventually affect the game itself. Smarter mission agents that adapt to how you fly? Pirate NPC factions that actually learn from player behavior and respond accordingly? Absolutely. That's the kind of thing that could make PvE in New Eden feel alive in ways it never has. But too much messing around with the inner workings of the game, the economy, the market, the core mechanics that players have spent decades learning and mastering? Hard pass. 

EVE works because its systems are legible. Players can study them, "exploit" them, literally build empires on top of them. The moment those systems start shifting under our feet because an AI decided they should, the trust breaks.

But here's the other question I keep asking, and I haven't seen a satisfying answer anywhere: what about our data?

The offline-server framing protects gameplay integrity. Great. But it doesn't tell us whether historical player data, chat logs, market transactions, behavioral records, 23 years of decisions made by hundreds of thousands of capsuleers, gets fed into DeepMind's models. Explosion.com flagged this concern. Nobody else in the mainstream coverage touched it. Hilmar's community letter, which is otherwise thoughtful and clearly written by someone who cares how this news is received, does not address it.

That's a gap. And it deserves a direct answer before Fanfest is over.

The numbers (because someone needs to keep score)

Pearl Abyss bought CCP in 2018 for $225M cash plus up to $200M in performance earn-outs that never triggered. The buyout price was $120M, roughly $100M cash plus about $20M in EVE Frontier token acquisition rights. The "$425M loss" figure floating around Reddit is wrong. Actual loss to Pearl Abyss is closer to $80M, and they accepted it because Crimson Desert money makes the write-down survivable.

The Google piece? Hilmar told Bloomberg the investment was "in the millions." So "small" stake. Not an acquisition. Basically, this is Icelandic ownership with a Google research contract attached.

A studio doing $70M+ in 2025 revenue, profitable at the EVE Online level, with a 20-year persistent IP, sold for 1.7x revenue. Well below comparable studios. The new ownership group got a favorable deal. Good for them!

What does worry me: Fenris is now running four concurrent products. EVE Online. EVE Vanguard. EVE Frontier, online space survival with a blockchain layer. And EVE Galaxy Conquest, a mobile 4X that Hilmar's letter quietly added to the portfolio. One cash cow, two unproven betas, and a mobile entrant. That's a lot of products for a small-ish independent studio.

Engadget called Frontier "likely-doomed." First piece of mainstream press to say that out loud.

The things you're already thinking

We're probably all thinking some version of these:

"AI in my EVE?" Yeah. I hear you. The offline-server framing limits exposure for now. But for now is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence, and we all know it.

"This is just another Hilmar hype cycle." Fair. I respect the man's ambition, but his track record cuts both ways and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Apocrypha and Citadel on one side. Incarna, monocle-gate, Project Nova, and Project Legion on the other. Independence removes the parent-company cushion that absorbed past failures. The highs are high. The lows cost people their jobs.

"Google bought EVE." They didn't. Minority stake, small dollars. Hilmar and the management team own this thing. But I get why the headline makes people nervous.

"Just a press release stunt." A founding DeepMind team member on the Fanfest stage and a real check with real dollars argue otherwise. This is funded research with named contacts, not a logo on a slide. More to come soon...

The bigger picture

Here's what I keep coming back to.

Game studios as AI research infrastructure is a genuinely new thing. 

Big-tech investment in gaming has historically been about distribution platforms, Stadia is dead, Luna is dying. This is different. Google isn't trying to own a games platform. They're treating EVE as a research environment. If it works, watch for similar deals between AI labs and studios running deep persistent worlds. EVE might be first. It won't be last.

And one thing worth noting that the recent mainstream coverage mostly missed: CCP already shipped AI features in EVE this year, an assistance tool trained on 5.8 million Rookie Help channel messages. The community accepted it without too much drama. DeepMind isn't AI's first arrival in New Eden. 

It's just a hell of a lot more ambitious.

What I'm watching for

Three things, over the next 18 months.

EVE Online update cadence. If expansions and patches slow because attention shifts to DeepMind work, that's the bear case materializing. We'll notice. We always notice.

Visible results. Papers. Blog posts. Something in the client. Vague long-term R&D partnerships are how companies announce things and quietly let them die. Show us something.

EVE Vanguard's Steam Early Access. Slated for Q3 2026. Lands right when Fenris needs to prove the new structure can actually ship a product. If it underperforms, financial pressure on the new ownership group accelerates fast.

Before any of that though, there's Fanfest

Bolton takes the stage this Thursday. Hilmar beside him. Us in the room, or watching from home, refreshing feeds. A community that has heard bold promises before and has the memory to hold people accountable for every single one of them.

The company that started in 1997 by saying "death is a serious matter" is now asking whether intelligence itself is.

I can't wait to find out what they mean by that.

Fly safe folks. 


References

Tier-1 tech and business press

Gaming industry trade press

Gaming consumer press

MMO-focused coverage

Primary sources

-
Labels: , , , , , , ,

1 comment:

Rixx Javix said...

As always an excellent article wrap-up. As you know, I agree and we'll be keeping a sharp eye on developments (or lack thereof) as time marches on. Cautiously optimistic as always. But the proof of it all will be based on results over time. Fingers crossed.

Mon May 11, 02:36:00 PM 2026

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Most popular posts in the last month