Google’s AI-focused DeepMind division has taken a minority stake in the developer of popular sci-fi simulation EVE Online, saying it will use the game to study “intelligence in complex, dynamic, player-driven systems.”
The research partnership comes as the management behind EVE Online developer CCP Games announced that they have spent $120 million to buy themselves out from their former owners at South Korean publisher Pearl Abyss (Crimson Desert). The newly independent entity is being rebranded as Fenris Creations, which will continue to operate as normal without any restructuring or layoffs, the company said.
“Something that already behaves like a living world”
In today’s announcement, Fenris and DeepMind said that EVE Online presents “a uniquely rich environment for study,” especially when it comes to developing AI systems that use “long-horizon planning, memory, and continual learning.” DeepMind says it will conduct controlled experiments on its models in a specially designed offline version of the game running on a local server, without directly impacting the experience for online players. The two companies “will also explore new gameplay experiences enabled by these technologies,” they wrote.
Google DeepMind has a long history of using games as a proving ground for machine learning models, from enabling breakthroughs in complex board games like Go to outperforming humans in Atari VCS games and StarCraft, for example. More recently, the company has begun using so-called “virtual world” models to help AI systems learn to operate in physical reality.
Fenris CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson said in an open letter addressed to players that “EVE is one of the few environments where questions about intelligence can be explored inside something that already behaves like a living world.” Studying EVE will allow Google DeepMind’s models to explore “difficult problems, long timelines [and] strange possibilities,” he added.
“As a gamer and games producer, I’ve long admired EVE,” Google DeepMind Director Alexandre Moufarek said in a statement. “What the EVE community has created together with [Pétursson] and team is truly unparalleled in gaming. It is a one-of-a-kind simulation for testing general-purpose artificial intelligence in a safe sandbox environment. I’m excited to partner with the team at Fenris Creations to push the frontier of artificial intelligence and explore new player experiences.”
Breaking free
The newly independent Fenris Creations said that “differences in operating context, current strategic focus, and long-term priorities” were among the reasons for the joint decision to part ways with Pearl Abyss, which purchased CCP Games in 2018. A Pearl Abyss spokesperson told Inven Global that “we concluded that selling the company to its current management is in the best interest of both parties’ futures.”
Pearl Abyss paid $225 million for the EVE Online maker just six years ago, meaning the recent $120 million sale represents a significant decline in value for the company.
The EVE Online player base has maintained a robust and balanced in-game economy for decades now, complete with its own examples of corporate intrigue, economic panics, and political subterfuge. But developer Fenris/CCP has faced financial struggles in recent years, with annual losses nearing $20 million in both 2023 and 2024.
Fenris/CCP said those losses were attributable in part to costly development work on blockchain-based spinoff EVE Frontier, which saw an alpha test launch last year, and extraction-shooter spinoff EVE Vanguard, which is planned for release later this year. But Fenris Creations said this week that the company was profitable in 2025 on $70 million in revenue and maintains “strong reserves.”
Now that it’s free from Pearl Abyss, Fenris says it will be able to make long-term strategic decisions similar to those it made before its 2018 purchase. Fenris CEO Pétursson added that internal control of the company will “giv[e] us a more direct structure for the kind of far-reaching decisions that EVE requires.”
The company’s “EVE Forever” philosophy is more than just a slogan to be rolled out at the annual Fanfest convention in Iceland, he continued. “It is a way of thinking about every decision we make. What does New Eden need in order to endure? What does the company need in order to support it? What kind of structure gives us the patience and resources to keep building this universe properly?”
