EVE Onlinehas been around for over two decades now, and naturally, it’s evolved quite a bit over the years. WhenEVE Onlinedebuted in 2003, it had a minimal onboarding process, with only a barebones set of tutorials to guide new Capsuleers through its gigantic galaxy. While developer CCP Games has tried its best to improve the Sci-Fi MMO’s onboarding process over the years, it’s started to rely more heavily on its community to welcome new players and teach them the game’s countless overlapping systems.
Game Rant recently attended EVE Fanfest, where this reliance on community was a common talking point of some of the event’s keynote discussions. During our time at Fanfest, we had the opportunity to sit down withCCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, who gave us invaluable insight into the decisions behindEVE Online’s current onboarding process and addressed some concerns fans have about the upcoming additions toEVE’s universe.This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Hilmar Veigar Pétursson’s Journey to Become CEO of CCP Games
Q: Could you tell me a little about how you first got into the video game industry?
A:When I was nine years old, I saw an ad in an Icelandic newspaper for the ZX Spectrum. I had to have one. I didn’t really know why, because I’d never seen a computer, I didn’t know anybody who owned a computer, and I didn’t really know what a computer was.
Then I got it up and running. But I had no software, no games. I opened up the magazine and started typing on the rubber keys. And that’s how it all started.
Q: What was the first game you worked on?
A:I modded the wall-breaker game that came with the ZX Spectrum. My first accomplishment in games was to make the wall-breaker pad bigger.
Q: Could you walk me through the journey of joining CCP Games and becoming its CEO?
A:I joined a company in Iceland called OZ Interactive, which is where a lot of us who then became CCP were working. I joined that company in August 1996. That company was making the metaverse. We were using VML – virtual reality modeling language – which was supposed to be the HTML for the 3D web.
It was veryNeal Stephenson-inspired. There was a street, you could load up different worlds, you could customize different avatars, and you could dance in space stations. We figured out that nobody really needed the metaverse. So, CCP was us being practical. We were going to make a game, not a metaverse. Obviously,EVE Onlinenow has all the properties of a metaverse.
I joined CCP in 2000 as CTO (Chief Technology Officer). I was basically tasked with figuring out how to makeEVE Online. So we spent almost three years of endless crunch doing that. The game came out in May 2003. We had some issues with Simon & Schuster, who were our publisher. Back in those days, we were still shipping games in boxes, and Simon & Schuster had the box distribution rights. There were no online rights. That wasn’t really a thing at the time, despite the game being online.
But Simon & Schuster shut down their game division. They were mainly a book publisher. So we have this rather awkward period where the game is out there, but there are no new boxes coming out. We spent a good six months negotiating with Simon & Schuster to try and get the rights back. In that period, the company was very constrained. We couldn’t really promote the game. We were in dire financial straits.
There was a period of time where I became CTO,Head of Marketing, and CEO to kind of manage the Hail Mary pass of publishing the game fully online, which I don’t think had ever been done at that point. We had the bold idea of having a three-day free trial. I think we were the first to do that. That really took off, and I’ve been doing that ever since.
Out of this desperation, we had to do all of our advertising online. We gained a bit of a competitive advantage on this front, which we probably still enjoy. There was a period of time when we were probably quite dominant in the banner ad space.
Q: Could you tell me a bit about your role in the Science and Innovation Council of Iceland?
A:The Council is a body that makes policy around science and innovation that is then ratified by the government. It’s a mixture of people from academia, industry, and science. When I joined, they were in the midst of doing some tweaks. They used to be very academically focused. Now there’s more of a mixture of innovation companies and universities, etc. There are some foreign appointees. There’s a very impressive chap from the UK with aNobel Prizein biology.
It’s a very robust team of people. We have these in-person summits 2–3 times per year when we tackle topics and make an action list that we present to the government. It’s very effective, actually.
The CEO of CCP’s Advice for EVE Online Newcomers
Q: How many hours do you think you’ve put intoEVE Onlineover the last two decades?
A:I mean it’s thousands. I don’t know how many thousands, but it’s thousands of hours.
Q: What’s one thing you recommend new players do when they startEVE Onlinefor the first time?
A:Doing the Epic Arcs is a good idea. There’s an Epic Arc called “Sisters of EVE.” I’d recommend doing that. Overall, I would recommend people accept some of the many Corporation invites they’ll get when theystart playingEVE Online.EVEis best enjoyed with other people. But often, people can be bashful in the beginning, they don’t want to join a Corp immediately. So they should do something like the Epic Arcs.
One thing I recently did when starting a new character wasask ChatGPTwhat I should do inEVE. Because so much has been written aboutEVEover the decades, all the AIs are deeply knowledgeable about what to do inEVE. I had this wonderful experience where ChatGPT coached me through playing very differently than I would normally. So that’s a new twist.
Q: What advice would you give to new players worried about losing their ships?
A:Ships inEVE Onlineare consumables, in a way. Don’t over-invest in your ship. The edict is “Don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose.” Think of your ship as a consumable, not something permanent that you should be cherishing endlessly. PlayingEVEis all about losing ships, and often to very stupid things.
Q: It was said during a presentation here at EVE Fanfest that CCP gives veteran players the tools to help newcomers. Could you detail these tools?
A:We’reintroducing Freelance Jobs. It’ll be a way for Corporations to recruit new players without having to accept them into the Corp. Often, people on the new player side are a bit hesitant to commit. We’re using these Freelance Jobs to essentially allow players to make mission content for the game.
This should be a way to allow Corporations to get sh*t done and also a way to recruit new players in a softer way. Generally, this is the strategy we’re employing right now. We’re trying to leverage the existing community to onboard new players.
We’ve also been working quite a bit on Fleets. The sooner people get into a Fleet with other players, the more they’re likely to convert. I would call outCorporation Projects and the Fleet system. Corporations have been great at inventing their own tools. A lot of them have new player-centered branches. They’ve created things like EVE University. There are curricula, YouTube content, teachers, etc. It’s actually quite amazing what the community does on that front. We’re often seeing what they’re doing and finding ways to incorporate that into the actual game.
The Future of the EVE Universe Is Bold
Q: How much of an impact does the CSM (the Council of Stellar Management) have onEVE Online’s ongoing development?
A:It’s ebbed and flowed throughout the years. Sometimes we kind of fall out of sync with the process. But right now it’s in a really good place. We had CSM19 over here in January. I was actually here for that week and I spent a lot of time with them. A lot of what was done in theEVE OnlineMarch Major Updateessentially came out of that meeting.
Q: It was also said during Fanfest that CCP is trying to be more transparent moving forward. What was the thought process behind this decision?
A:I think we’ve always been very transparent. We’ve been doing this for 22 years in an open way. Once, there was a multi-plug that got turned off, and it crashed the servers. It was very early days. We just posted a picture and wrote exactly what happened. We have generally been quite transparent.
But these things ebb and flow through history. We’ve gone through phases where we’re scrutinizing blogs a lot. People in marketing are sometimes sensitive to our self-bashing. CCP Okami’s blog is more like how we used to do things, as opposed to anything new per se.
Q: The EVE Universe is about to get a lot bigger withEVE FrontierandEVE Vanguard. Are there any concerns about balancing three gigantic MMOs at once?
A:We had a bit of experience with this withDust 514. It’s a little bit like exporting and importing between countries, which is obviously a hot topic these days. You kind of balance between the borders as a way to manage the flow of goods and services between boundaries. That gives us a way to decouple a bit. There’s high decoupling between the games, but they still meaningfully affect each other. A lot of what we did inDust 514prepares us for balancing across games.
Q: Some players are a bit worried aboutEVE Frontier’s cryptocurrency and are worried that it could divide theEVEplayer base. How do you feel about those concerns?
A:EVE Frontieris violently experimental. I mean, we have our own worries about it. I think it’s all good to have worries about it. It is wild. Obviously, we’re doing our best so that it ends up being cool. I don’t think it’ll pull currentEVEplayers away fromOnline. What we see more withEVE Frontieris players who haven’t played for a long time coming back, as it’s sort of like a fresh start. Everyone’s on the same level. It’s more about the reset and the new mystery.
As I said in the EVE Fanfest keynote, by being this erratically innovative and disruptive withEVE Frontier, we have the ability to generate new technology that we can then migrate over toEVE Online, which has already been shown with the GPU rendering pipeline. We’ll see more elements like this, where we transfer technology once we’ve proven them inEVE Frontier.
Q: You’ve been working onEVEfor over 20 years now. What’s one thing that’s kept you going this time?
A:The community. Something like going around the pub crawl this weekend and seeing all the happiness and love for this game has kept me going.
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