EVE Online developer CCP Games has broken away from Pearl Abyss and rebranded as Fenris Creations as it enters into a “research partnership” with Google DeepMind. The deal is valued at $120 million – that’s around £88 million.
Now controlled by its own senior management and long-term investors – one of which is Google – the studio says this structure was better “aligned with the company’s future as a developer, publisher, and operator of player-driven online experiences” and “designed to support strategic decision-making for persistent live games and long-running virtual worlds”.
As for the Google DeepMind partnership? The studio said it will use Eve Online to explore “areas including long-horizon planning, memory, and continual learning”, calling the game a “uniquely rich environment for study”.
If you’re not entirely sure what that actually means for players, you’re not alone, but Google will reportedly work with an offline, local test version of Eve Online where together, the partnership “will also explore new gameplay experiences enabled by these technologies”.
“Eve is built to endure – and it only works if you’re willing to keep pushing into the future. This transition gives us direct ownership, clear accountability, and the independence to invest in worlds that grow over decades,” said Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of Fenris Creations.
“We’re grateful to Pearl Abyss for their partnership and for the consistent support they’ve shown us over the past seven and a half years. Eve Online exists today because of pioneering thinking, patience, and trust between developers and players. Our new structure and partners enable us to carry that legacy forward – continuously evolving a living universe and actively exploring what it can become, with forever in mind.”
Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, added: “Games have always been a huge part of my life – I’ve been a gamer since I was a kid, and I started my career designing and programming complex AI simulation games like Theme Park. They’ve also been at the heart of many of Google DeepMind’s breakthroughs – like Atari DQN, AlphaGo, AlphaStar and SIMA – because they’re the perfect training ground for developing and testing AI algorithms.
“I’ve known [Veigar] for many years and long admired his work, and I’m thrilled to partner with him and the fantastic team at Fenris Creations to explore new gaming experiences and advance AI research safely inside a player-driven universe as amazingly complex as Eve Online.”
As newer MMOs shutter or struggle to find an audience, 22-year-old Eve Online recently saw a massive surge in new players. Find out why in Conor’s dive deep.