EVE Online – Making the game that wants to live forever – Hilmar Veigar Pétursson bares his soul

As much of the world basks in a heatwave, I am looking out of my hotel window in Reykjavik at a container vessel with the words Royal Arctic Line emblazoned across its side. It is not warm in Iceland, at least not in May. 

Situated across from the hotel is the magnificent Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre – a structure that, once inside, looks like you are wandering through a scene from Inception after a night on too much Jack Daniels. 

I am in Iceland for five days, courtesy of CCP Games, for the return of EVE Fanfest, a global gathering of EVE Online fanatics all descending like returning gaming Vikings to find out everything that’s new in the world of one of the longest-running games on the planet.

Tales of bars that specialize in White Russians, and others that specialize in making sure you have the mother of all headaches the next day, will have to keep for another time. My main purpose here is to speak with Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games.

Pétursson’s vision has overseen the Icelandic gaming giant for 25 years now – that’s a quarter of a century that has seen more than just the landscape of videogaming change dramatically.

It’s day one of Fanfest, I’ve already been treated to the Opening Ceremony, with players from many clans (they are Corporations in the world of Eve Online), and now it’s time to talk to the man himself.

We find ourselves tucked away in one of the glass boxes that serve as meeting rooms in the Harpa.

Pétursson wouldn’t look amiss if you AI’d his portrait into a ChatGPT rendition of a Viking Warrior, protecting the village of New Eden somewhere south of the Arctic, rather than up there in a galaxy far, far away.

CCP’s friendly PR bodyguard, George, points out that many of the company’s staff see Hilmar as a father figure, and it’s easy to see why – although I imagine he has the ability to send you to the naughty step, should you step out of line.

In the beginning

I am quickly corrected on my first mistake. It’s 25 years at CCP, not 21 as I thought. Great start. But from then on, I am keen to know what it has been like watching a gaming company grow up through the difficult toddler years, through stroppy teenage tantrums and reach adulthood and responsibilities – after all, phenomenally few games live anywhere close to as long as EVE Online has.

“So, if I were to have been me, the person I am today, I would probably have had this experience. But I am 27 when it all starts. So I am kind of growing up with it, too. So in a way, we have gone through the same stages with the state of the company and the state of myself. 

“So, it doesn’t really feel like that. But if you were to take the perspective we have today and look at us sort of from memory to the past, then you can certainly see a lot of developmental stages in this typical arc of companies. Like there is the sort of success stage, there’s the maturity stage, there’s perhaps the older maturity stage, and there’s like a brief disruption stage.”

Encapsulating a quarter of a decade in the space of a half-hour interview was never going to be easy, but I was keen for Hilmar to have a crack – what exactly were the folk at CCP expecting when EVE first launched?

“I think, I mean, we had ideas about the community, and what the community would bring and players would bring, “ he said, “But you tend to have modest ideas about, like, what that would bring to the equation, because otherwise you are, in a way, sort of expecting a lot from people.

“I think this is common with people who are maybe doing their first game, or haven’t seen this before, is that you underestimate how quickly people master the game, how quickly they go through the game, how quickly they band together and exceed all the expectations. 

“I think I mean in many ways, we were just way underestimating how quickly everything would happen and how much of it would happen, like the formation of the first kind of alliances and the first geopolitical warfare. I mean, this is just month two, and it is already happening at an extremely grand scale.”

So was that thrilling, or terrifying to witness?

“It was more, oh my God, we’re not ready for this kind of energy. And in many ways, that has been the energy all along, but I think we’ve just learned to hold on to that as a good thing, like the ‘Oh my God, they’ve done in months, but that should have been done in years?”

Chasing the tail

I think the organisational ability, like when players organise, how much can be achieved through that, I think, is something that everyone underestimates. And because the game is single-shard, it rewards collaboration in groups very much. 

“Once people got that going, and they got it going so quickly, they just ran through, like, achieving all the milestones, with regards to how we thought it would take years for people to get battleships. It took months. We thought it would take years for these, like massive territorial conquest meta-gaming adventures, to happen. It took weeks and months. So this was very much kind of the experience. We felt very much like we were chasing the tail of our own players.”

And chase them they have, always providing new content, new thrills and new challenges in the quest to make EVE Online, perhaps, whisper it, last forever. The company even has a slogan now, EVE Forever, as it embraces the possibility of the game being around longer than all of us.

“So I don’t think forever was in our brain,” Helmar tells me,  but it was often asked of us, kind of, sort of during the development period and in the early days, “so when are you going to make Eve 2?” and “When are you going to make plans?”.

“I think our literal plans were like five years. Yeah, the plans we put in, the business plans, so we’re like peaking out at 150,000 subscribers and petering out over five years. Because it just seemed silly to put anything more, it was just nobody ever really did it, it’s unprecedented. 

“We, even in our rational mind, didn’t really even have that imagination. But I can say every time Eve 2 came up, we always kind of thought now doesn’t seem right. So I think that was almost like a proxy for us, sort of in our heart of hearts, thinking the game would go on forever.

It’s now developed with ourselves to talk about the game like that. Not in a sort of positioning sense, or something like that, but more like, “Okay, if we say it’s gonna go on forever, what does that mean? Really?

“You have to think differently beyond just marketing. You have to think about succession, obviously, both for players and the people at the company. I mean, I’m not gonna live forever. How do I then set up a company that can take care of something forever? 

“And what are the things that have gone on forever anyway? I mean, in gaming, we actually do have an example. Nintendo, for all practical purposes, has gone on forever. They’re over 200 years old, like Nintendo was making play cards in the 1700s or something. So, I mean that is practically forever in some sense.

“Then you start to think about things that might go on forever, like the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the Bible, and Elvis Presley. Coca-Cola will probably exist forever.”

These days, though, it’s pretty clear there isn’t much boardroom thinking in terms of forever. We live in a world where some games barely last three months before being canned.

“So I think maybe an aspect of this is that we didn’t really think of it like a game. We’ve always thought a lot about it – more about it – like a world. Eve is a lot more made like a world. And I think it’s much easier to think of a world lasting forever rather than a game going on forever. So I think this, this world approach to how we think about it, probably makes it easier to talk about, like, we want this world to last forever.”

EVE’s universe begins to expand

Over the years, the EVE crew has never been afraid to use the IP to push out into new areas. Upcoming, there is the excellent-looking EVE Vanguard FPS shooter and EVE: Frontier, the mysterious alternate history EVE game decentralized on the Blockchain.

Are these new games in their own right, or tools to entice and hook players into the complexities of the main operator?

“So again, going back to this world concept. Is Eve a world or a universe? In English, you could call a planet a world, and another planet a world. In Icelandic, the word is more related to a universe; it’s a little more metaphysical.

“If you think of that as the substrate of what we’re building, and then there’s a social layer on top, which is kind of the community, and then the community is playing games within the world. So we feel like we’re adding another game into the world, and the game will bring new players into the world, and they might be playing in the world like that, with running and gunning on planets, and other people might be mining. Other people might be fighting, some people might be manufacturing in space, or even on a planet. So we think about it more like we’re adding more gameplay to the world (with each new game).”

EVE’s grand adventure

“(EVE).. is a sci-fi military simulation. It’s a very military cycle sort of game. It’s very much about, like, building and destroying spaceships for territorial conquest. And when you think of the organisation of the military, you have the people on the ground, you have the people flying, you have the people planning, you have the logistics people, but nobody’s cross-playing all disciplines.

“Where are the Marines? Where is the Air Force? We’re the logistics department. The general is not shooting. So, we think of this as organizing these structures of people. I want to focus on the particular aspect. More and more ways to participate in that grand adventure.”

George interjects, “So the way we’ve described it internally is that New Eden is a living universe, And that there are multiple gateways into this living universe, We made EVE Valkyrie, even though we don’t have Eve Valkyrie as an accessible app, in the lore, there are still Valkyries flying around there in the background, Eve Online is one gateway into New Eden. Vanguard is another gateway, and so on.”

EVE Frontier and the Blockchain

In many walks of life, the world of crypto and the Blockchain are seen as shady, and some players do not want to see these less-understood aspects of a future digital life creep into gaming. CCP, however, is building EVE Frontier on the Blockchain. A risk? Or a gamble worth taking?

“It ties back to this forever idea. If we are to build something forever, in the concept of forever, what is probably the greatest risk factor to forever? It’s generally if you have something centralized. It is a single point of failure.

“We operate EVE Online. It runs on a database in the Docklands area in London. It’s owned by an Icelandic company situated here in Reykjavik. These are like centralization points, which are weak points. So if there are ways to decentralise everything around the game, then, while that’s super hard to do, obviously, you’ll have a fairly redundant system in the Forever concept. So we really wanted to experiment with whether it is possible to build a proper game experience, a proper world where there is no single point of failure in the whole setup of the thing.

“So a community of people could propel the game just through the power of the community forever. Blockchain is a way to achieve that kind of decentralization. I mean, it’s not the only way, but you end up pretty soon with a fairly similar system.

“Actually, in the late 90s, I was working on a peer-to-peer distributed computing architecture in a VML – stuff that was here in Iceland. So, I mean, we were thinking about this in the late 90s, and this was very much in the sort of early days of the Internet. The Internet itself was very much about decentralization. It has become very centralized, and that is often the way of life – you start with an ideal, and then it kind of turns into something different at the end of it. Today is a very centralised phenomenon, unfortunately. But when we saw this blockchain tech and concepts come along, it was like, Okay, here’s a way to build something that is decentralised and that has a better chance to go on forever.”

How do you keep a workforce forever?

The thing that engaged me, as a humble writer of words during my time in Reykjavik, is the attitude of literally everybody I speak to at CCP. Regardless of where they may have flown in from, and whatever pressures EVE Fanfest 2025 is placing on their shoulders, there is joy and smiles in abundance. Then, on the other side, the passion of the fanbase who turn out time after time, probing and prompting the devs to do what may have once seemed impossible.

I’m keen to get Hilmar’s thoughts on how this all comes together.

“So what I feel the most about it is how happy everyone is. Like, genuinely happy. There’s a lot of hard work for everyone at CCP to do, but they’re so happy to do it. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is jumping in to do all sorts of things way out of their kind of normal remits. People are just doing all kinds of jobs all over the place, and with such genuine smiles on their faces, it runs like clockwork.

I mean, there is nobody really frantically doing anything. People are generally calm and just very happy, and there is very little last-minute scrambling. I mean, there was a lot of that, for sure, in the beginning, before we kind of understood what this was about.

And now we’re coming back here to Harpa. We were last here seven years ago, and that’s kind of just focused the mind.”

The state of the industry

With my time running out, I think it’s important to get a last question in. Hilmar Veigar Pétursson has been in this game as long as I have, which is unusual. He has seen the same stuff from the perspective of the game creators. He has seen the same current swathes of layoffs of late, and I want to know if he is concerned that it will scare people away from careers within the gaming industry if it is seen as so unstable.

He pauses.

“I think the gaming industry has always been a bit of a mess. I don’t think this is a recent phenomenon, unfortunately.

“The industry is this mix of art, business, communities, and marketing. I mean, it’s a very complicated thing to make a successful game.

“Look at movies. They are almost built to be like this, and it took them 100 years to get to that point where there is some process around the chaos. And I think games are still kind of just figuring out exactly what they are and how they should be operating.”

“Making a movie has a beginning and an end, and when it’s over, you work on another movie. Maybe that’s one way games could manage some of the chaos.”

And with that, it was back into the HARPA with the rest of the Goons, Pandemic Horde, and The Initiative, alongside the many others who had made this pilgrimage to this icon of gaming longevity.

Many thanks to CCP and Indigo Pearl for access and time to EVE Fanfest