Hilmar Petursson on Building Games That Last Forever

[music] Welcome to the Navit Gaming Podcast, where it is our mission to explore the business and future of video games. We bring together the industry's brightest builders, investors, and thinkers to keep a pulse on current events, dissect emerging trends and games, share lessons learned, and have a great time. This podcast is also part of Navik's growing ecosystem which ranges from free and premium research to consulting and advisory services. For more information, visit www.navic.co. This episode is brought to you by Listo. Listo is an AI native play testing platform helping game studios capture unbiased player feedback and convert it into structured, actionable insights. Whether you're validating new features or catching us friction before launch, Listo empowers the entire game team to move faster with clear insights and less

guesswork. To learn more and get in touch, visit lysto.gg or check out the link in the show notes. And with that, let's jump into the episode. What's up everyone and welcome to the Novak Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Alex, and this is the interview and insight segment. I asked myself while preparing for today's conversation, how many games last a decade, two decades? Um, and to name a few, I thought of Runescape, World of Warcraft, Tibia, League is getting close to 20. It's not been 20 yet. I think it's at like 15, 16, and Eve Online. And then I thought, what qualities do these games all share such that they've survived over 20 years? And what does it take to build a game that outlasts its creators? And to me personally, it's a few things. playerdriven stories, highly social environments, and low-key, well, just continuing to actually update the game. Um, but today we're going to hear from an expert on building games that outlast creators and beyond the game's design, what technical choices might need to be made to do so. We are in fact

going to talk about the longest living of the titles that I've mentioned, Eve Online, and its subsequent chapter currently in development, Eve Frontier. Launched in 2023, Eve was the first major MMO to build its game logic on a relational database, allowing complex economic simulations that it's famous for. By 2025, CCP had cited over 25 million lifetime players and more than a billion in lifetime revenue. And today, another chapter, as I mentioned, of Eve is in development. Eve Frontier, a blockchain powered spin-off built on the SU network by Misten Labs. SW's object- ccentric architecture allows tens of thousands of star systems and playeruilt structures to exist on chain which is very naturally synonymous with the original game's design. I did used to run the crypto segment here at Navvice. So beyond discussing the E franchise, I look forward to rehashing why the blockchain is the absolute next natural step. With that, I'd like to introduce my guest uh Hillar Porten um CEO of CCP. Beyond being the board member on several

Icelandic game industry and technological development funds and councils, Hillar might be the easiest bio I've ever had to write because you've been the CEO of CCP for 26 years and I think that sets a record for the tenure of guests that I've ever had on the show. So, welcome. Um, please feel warmly welcome to the show and it's good to have you on.
Wow, what an intro. Thank you. Very happy to be here.
Yeah, excited to have you on and it's amazing. I was like, "Wow, this is a very simple introduction. There's just 26 years of CCP." Um, which is going to make for an amazing conversation. So folks in the audience plotting course today we're going to hit the chapters and history of CCP why blockchain is the next evolution in the E franchise what happens to the E franchise as a macro hole and Hillmar um given your long tenure in the gaming industry and your legacy um we're going to close with some of uh some questions on your perspectives on the state of the current gaming industry today but first history

and chapters of CCP um I want to start with a brief history and the way that I broke this up was BS before steam um Pearl Abyss or sorry before Steam then Steam then Pearlis and then the business today um and I'm going to ask you a few questions around each chapter. Um so Oh, go ahead.
Yeah, I mean [clears throat] so um I would maybe uh start on chapter zero uh which is interesting.
Yeah. So um so my first job uh in games slashmaking uh 3D on the internet was actually with an Icelandic company called O Interactive. So I [snorts] joined that company in August 96 straight out of university where I haven't been finished university and that company was making uh the metaverse um one for one as we saw it in the latest sort of revival of the metaverse and very much inspired by Snow Crash and

Neil Stevenson etc. We were using VRML virtual reality modeling language to create like a UGC platform uh back in 96. This is almost pre pre- internet bubble. Um and uh and that was a very good preparation for what then became CCP is that we very specifically kind of figured out that nobody really needed a mirror. Certainly not back then. Maybe in some future they will. Um I think we could probably time us as 50 years too early on the metaverse. So um a few of us kind of uh uh step out of that company to create like an un an official spin up that is CCB to do just something simple like uh making a single shard uh multiplayer space MMO with uh the biggest kind of uh number of players participate in the same simulation. That

that was like a simplification on the metaverse idea to us. Uh and it's very interesting to see how over time uh even land kind of exceeded all our wildest dreams about psycho what a metverse uh would be. Um so um the best way to create a metverse was specifically not to make it and quote unquote just make a game. So um so with that [clears throat] out there I think um what kind of inspired team online was a our sort of work on making the metaviverse and figuring out without gameplay and basic stuff like inventory and progression etc. Uh nobody really has any reason to be in the metaverse. Uh and then um a lot of us were playing Ultim online. um which for me was actually I wouldn't say it was a step down but there was an interesting experience because mostly I'd been playing mods before which was kind of text based on mainframe

computers kind of a a simulation of a world um and very much has informed everything we have done from nuts to metaverse to kind of ultimately elite the huge inspiration sci-fi movies like uh player and error, alien, aliens etc. So um out of this kind of big mixture of uh all the things we uh we sort of come together and um and the first act of the company is to make a family board game in Iceland to uh seed fund the company. Um, and actually that board game sold 10,000 copies, which is b basically one in every eight homes in Iceland bought a copy of the of the uh of the board game. So in [clears throat] terms of like hitting our core market segment, we have some work to do uh when it comes to our games on a on a global scale, but

uh we've set the the buy bar high for market penetration with our board game. Uh that became seed capital. We're going to make a prototype of V19 where we then raised money in Iceland actually in April 2000 which for people that um pay attention to things is one month after the official burst of the internet bubble but uh the news just didn't really travel as much back in those days. So u the internet bubble was still very much alive uh throughout the early 2000s. So um uh with that in hand like all the inspiration uh somewhat kind of understanding of how to build your boats [snorts] we then spent three years of like the the craziest crunch I've ever participated in but almost heard about and then somehow with what is best described as a miracle uh ragd bunch of

people in Iceland 30 in total. Um, which had never made a game. We just made metaverses before and we had not even seen a game developer from afar uh when we we should be online. Um and uh to its benefit and to its kind of work in progress uh is the fact uh we we've been we've been uh what should I say ping it up to reach this kind of full form for the past 20 years based on those kind of initial conditions.
Wow. Yeah. Yeah, and I appreciate the well this was definitely in the before before Steam chapter um because you're talking in 2000's April team of 30, you know, you initially built a board game, this ambition to build the metaverse in like 1996 or whatever date you said. Um and so you launched Eve in 2003, like you said, with this this miracle, right, to I think you said 30 people. Um and

like you like I mentioned in the introduction, it was the first MMO to be built on a relational database versus writing to a disk. And I guess how did you think about this systems design approach that influenced everything from the skill system to the economy given that you guys maybe hadn't like you said that this was the first game this team had shipped before. Perhaps you had no preconceived notions of the way it was supposed to go. But was there any specific thought to that systems design question that was very different from other video games perhaps at the time? Yeah. So, we [clears throat] decided early on we were not going to have shards or servers. It will call kind of shards in an MMO sense. So back then when you were
joining a particular server for Ultim online, there's even a big backstory in Ultim online about like the vizard shring the diamond and each sh of the diamond is as a copy of the world kind of
very elaborate technical backstory to excuse the fact that there are servers. Uh so we wanted to have everyone play

the same game. So everyone on planet Earth will be able to interact with each other if they meet in space. And every story told in this world will be a common story for everyone playing that game. And that had a lot of architecture and game design implications. So, one, I mean, we we specifically picked a space game because you have to build a lot of space, for lack of a better word, to have like hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people share our game world. And space is well easier to make than trees and grass and caves and all those things. Um, and uh, and we made like 7,000 solar systems, which were kind of procedurally generated. So, you need big you need a big space. then you need to have a pretty good idea of how you're going to store all the data for all the players at that scale. And because we had more background in metaverse and and enterprise software

development, it was a fairly intuitive pick for us to just use a database. We did not realize at the time it was a mildly controversial choice. I have to debate other MMO developers at like Austin GBC 2005. I remember being on a panel and being quite perplexed that this was controversial. Um and um but it was kind of intuitive. Okay. Um millions of people putting their energy into a ship shared persistent world. You would use something that is the industry standard for persistence which were databases at the time. Um then um when everyone is playing the same game um the game becomes a massive social coordination construct. So u um it is different when you're playing on a maybe small shard with maybe a few thousand people versus you're playing on a on a

on a universe with hundreds of thousands of people. So we have to come up with bigger problems for the coordination making sense. So uh this is in part why even line has been so long living uh and this also factors into the th of space like um the game is literally on a galactic scale and the things you can do in the game are of a galactic scale. So um so when you have like titans to build which are bigger than cities on planet earth and you need like uh thousands of people to achieve it. Uh I think the first kiton was built by 4,000 people over 4 months. You can just imagine the coordination of getting that to happen like uh all the logistics of it. Why are people doing it in the first place? So it goes into a lot of this kind of flexible social

organization at scale that Hari wrote extremely well about in Sapiens. When I read that book then I was like okay wow now finally I have a words for what was just intuition about like the it subjective reality concept he talks about in that book is very much exercised in ean line. You could argue e line is it subjective reality to being to a point where I sometimes call it a an iter objective reality because the the persistency layer takes it from a fantasy to be a concretely kind of um visceral thing or or like a real thing. So uh so [clears throat] these were some of the sort of architecture decisions that flowed from the fact you wanted everyone to play the same game. uh and um and that is still not really something that people kind of dare even try even today.
Yeah, that's really interesting. And I

think also that's another thing that I pulled out from that is, you know, I mentioned the just updating the game as part of a way to help the game live beyond its initial stasis. But, you know, for you, you kind of mentioned this like element of like power creep. Um I've watched, you know, in every anime, every season, something needs to escalate. bigger bigger boss SS plus hero. Um so I think that's something similar and you created like from the very beginning setting it in space having it be big right and colossal created for those moments where you could basically kind of power creep the game up or make bigger moments that you were more impactful to the community at a grander scale. Um and so I'm curious because now that you know we're in 2003 you've launched this game. It was a little bit perplexing as to how you decided to host it and and how people engage with it, but you did eventually um go launch on Steam, you know, when Steam came out in 2008. Um I think you that's around the that's around the right time. Um and I'm curious what made

you decide to launch the game as a box game and then I think later on you switched to freeto play. um walk me through like your kind of psychology more maybe from more from the business perspective at that time about what what was going on for CCP and why you guys made that decision.
Yeah. So [clears throat] when we are uh laying down kind of the plan for the game in literally the year 2000 then it was not a realistic option to uh put something that was kind of CD ROM sized in terms of megabytes something that is 600 megabytes as a download only option. It just wasn't really feasible on a on a worldwide scale. So box distribution was still very much a thing. If you look at like Ultima, EverQuest, World of Warcraft, E Online, they all came in a box initially. So this element of like you would buy the box, the box would have a CT key.

The CT key was one month of subscription was how you took MMOs to market. So uh we kind of just follow that kind of uh basic play pattern in 2003. Um and we had made a deal with um with um with Simon and Schustster which actually had a a division for interactive software and computer games. Um so we had made an arrangement with them to be our publisher and distributor. They actually decided to stop doing games and focus on books which were I mean obviously are a big deal but Amazon was coming online and many sort of new vectors for them to deal with. So they closed down their uh gaming division while we are uh publishing the game. So in the middle of that um moment basically sort of leading up I think it was few months before our release they basically close everything down. So we have this weird situation where we're uh

we actually don't have the publishing rights to the game um and the game is only available in a box that are already been distributed into channel. [clears throat] So there was 30,000 copies of EV online that were lost to the retail channels of the world. So when the game comes out, there is almost like a sort of worldwide scavenger hunt of all the people that have been playing in our beta tests which was just downloaded in finding an ebox with the CD key and scratching it off and sharing it between each other because ah I found one in Holland. Hey, I found one in Wisconsin. And then Eve players were just kind of trolling and scavenging um and they found almost all the boxes in the in the distribution system. But then we had like a six months period where we couldn't really uh offer the game for download until we had come to an arrangement for Salmon and Sister

which they very thankfully um gave us the permission uh to um to offer the game as a digital download. So we in a way became sort of end of 2003 the first game again to be only digital download and no post distribution and that was quite unheard of. Then we did little hacks like um we offered a 3-day trial without giving your credit card information ahead of time. All sorts of these kind of things uh which we experimented with on the go to market front.
Interesting. Then we actually did get an email from the young upstart of Steam uh or of Valve with Steam in 2006. We still have that email, a reach out from uh uh somebody at Valve on uh introducing Steam to us. Of course, I use Steam playing HalfLife and all that. Um and I think we did become the first

multiplayer game not made by Valve on Steam. I think initially they focused on just single player games. I think we were one of the first multiplayer games uh to join Steam. Uh and I think you're probably right on 2008. I think we got the email in 2006 and uh it probably took us a couple of years to work it out because it was a bit or orthodox with our subscription model work on Steam and I had many fun meetings over at W about that where we again to a pretty good solution which I think is still the solution we have for for every kind of subscription game on Steam.
Got it. Um and so you mentioned like a couple partners, right? And that I think brings me to kind of this third chapter, right? So Steam is a partner. Um sorry, Simon and Schustster, the publisher, um who's now in books. Um and then in 2018, um I believe Pearl Abyss, um you do an acquisition for about 425 million. Um

what were you guys thinking at the time? And actually looking back, given today, how would you think about this deal right now in 2025? So um obviously [clears throat] by 2018 when we joined with parlair CCP has been in operation for over 20 years and um uh and to get the game initially funded. I mean it wasn't just the seed capital from the board game. We had raised money in 2000 from mainly Icelandic investors. We had more sort of um international investors join us in 2005 which was mostly kind of secondary sear sales from the initial Icelandic investor cohort um to um um investors I mean um one of the most company called catalyst which have actually done quite well for themselves

uh since then but they were they were a bit of the first East Coast VC kind of vibe back then. Um and um so we had kind of uh done secretary kind of rec capital not capitalized the company but kind of re-engineered the cap table um once and of course um there is the natural thing of like some point you provide an exit. So um when we join off with polar base it actually was a process which we run with the uh investment back rain uh talked to like a lot of different options on that front and peris definitely came out on top
[snorts]
um and it was very much driven by the fact that uh I mean if we're not going to IPO company at some point um investment horizons and all that are getting to a place where it makes sense Um so uh that was kind of the thinking of uh doing that. Um I mean Pearl is an

extremely inspiring company. Um they had of course made an MMO called Black Desert which in many ways has way more similarities with Eon line than than people think on the surface of it. Obviously, Black Desert is an extremely cool sort of action RPG kind of like fantasy game and your own is a space game. But, uh, if you have ever tried to make beer in Black Desert, um, you understand how I make the analogy of like the level of complexity, the level of hardcornness of both. Uh, uh, there was a lot of alignment. So, we've uh had a great time with Palabas on just more sharing the tricks and trades of how you make an MMO in Korea, how you make an MMO in Iceland, four places. Um so, um that has been a a very productive relationship on kind of it feels like more sort of two game

makers owning their craft uh by kind of sharing knowledge and and perspective from our very different corners of the world. are still kind of bunting together in this passion for for uh online games and games overall. Obviously, they're upcoming games Crimson Desert who is I don't know a tour to force of open world fantasy games unlike almost like a crown cap auto level sk is actually a single player game uh which u uh which is also very interesting in the state of the game state of games overall which we can cover later. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That sort of brings us to that's 2018 to sort of today, right? And before I move on to Eve Frontier, um want to ask a couple questions about like snapshot of Eve Online today? Sort of, you know, do you what's the average age of an EVE player today? Um what is the where does what does revenue streams look like for you

today? Um, and I'd also be curious because you guys have been um, building kind of this relational database model where you're tracking so many pieces of the economy. I'd be curious if you could name like the top like five KPIs that you guys track. Um, and I bet they differ from standard live ops games. So those are think are the questions. Um, average age of an EV online player, what does the business look like today? And top five KPIs um, that you guys track.
Yeah. So it's very interesting. Uh when we shipped email line the average age of CCP employees was 27
and the average age of email line players was 27.
Mhm. [clears throat]
Um and that initial cohort we joined us in the year 2003 with a scavenger hunt for the boxes and all those kind of fun things uh has in many ways very much stayed with us ever since. So the core audience has almost aged with the game. So um over time the um the average age

of of the overall E player base is kind of anchored with the initial cohort that then kind of in a way retains forever. Um, so of course we then add uh new people. We are, it's a bit counterintuitive to other MMO makers I compare notes with that we do have about half a million people that play Eve for the first time every single year. Uh, so we actually do not have as big of a challenge in uh people joining the game. We do have an ongoing struggle on how to onboard people into ETH that that has uh there are many famous memes on the internet with the learning curve of IoT and as the game has grown in content and complexity and kind of legendariness that learning curve is not getting any easier. Um we have become smarter over

time uh and we have had to learn a lot on that front on how how to operate people more effectively. So I think actually to today is the best time to join new online and um we've introduced various peoples to connect new players and veteran players together in a productive way which I think is becoming the the best way. So if I were to now take the medianates, it actually isn't quite my median age. I'm now 52 and it's a bit lower. I think uh I recall a number like 38 years old would be the median age. It's actually not something we track very much. We are not so much obsessing about that. What I find very inspiring that often we have quite young people make it to the upper echelons of Eon line. Actually, we have a democratically elected council called the council of stellar management that

comes to Iceland every year at the start of the year and spends a week at CCP headquarters debating with our game designers withelves about like the comingings and going and I I uh make an effort to always join up and and be kind of with them in that experience. And there were two people on the CSM in their early 20s uh this year. So to make it in your early 20s to the I don't know highest echelons of e online be elected by the player base onto the council of star management which only has I think nine seats uh is quite the achievement and in both cases those um those people had started playing him online one was 12 year old and the other one was something like uh 16 I think so uh I found that inspiring that uh that people are still joining him online in their kind of mid- teens and joining uh to the

top of the game. So um that kind of fights against the the the median just growing out uh as as the tech gets pow.
Sure. Um, and yeah, and we'll talk about this a little bit more in the E franchise and I would I have some parallels with um back in I was at Blizzard when we launched uh WoW Classic and some analoges about like how you're thinking about players as relation to the game living forever, but we'll get there in a second. Um, but the other question was about um what are like the five KPIs that you guys track? Um, and then we'll move on to talking about uh EF Frontier. So um I mean to your point earlier we used to uh track a lock transactions per second uh% because uh we were um we were using Microsoft SQL Server and we were were by far the highest TPS application on SQL Server when we come out. SQL Server was kind of just having its early

stacks into the world of of basically competing with Oracle. Um and uh and because we couldn't afford Oracle, we picked Microsoft Secosur. Uh and we were damn we were banging that rapidly with with transactions per second. We were even getting like bleeding edge builds uh from the SQL Server team uh to patch up some issues we had with bugs and bottlenecks in the in the game because we're really testing it. Um, so I mean for scale which uh I mean obviously isn't a lot today but we're doing about 10,000 transactions per second which uh I mean it's still a respectable number today but it was it was borderline science fiction back in the when we released the game and I uh we actually didn't really find a good way to address it until I found a company in the US called Texas Memory System uh located in Houston and they had invested something

called the RAM sand. So it basically was like a solid disk drive but using uh uh not like uh solid state memory but just normal random access memory as you make in computers but operated with battery sort of reserve power. Um, and they were using this in the oil industry in Texas. And we needed to get some like special military equipment export license to get the Ramsson uh out of the US then to our long-term data center. And once we have the Ramsson, uh, our sort of TPS problem kind of went away. Uh, so we've been kind of kind of fine on that front since then. But that did take a while to to figure out. Um [snorts] then um there's another kind of technical parameters uh which we watch how how bad it becomes because what also happened over time

with the coordination at scale sort of that Eve backs for is that Eve players started to one up themselves in how many people they could pile into one massive fleet fight as it's called in Eve. So two sides are fighting over something. Sometimes it was a little bit unclear on care other than just to break the record but now we have made various sort of victory criterias etc that become the point of it. Um and we have set the Guinness world record for the largest game fight uh quite often. I think it's now sits just over 8,000 people kind of in an allout brawl inside kind of a pretty epic spaceship soup. Uh I would encourage anyone to check out the video clips of it. It's something to behold. Um and uh and this both became a major problem for

our servers, but also for the experience. 8,000 people 4,000 on each side calling shots and things like that. It's very hard to make happen in runtime. So we came up with this concept of time dilation inspired of course by time dilation in physics in our own reality. So uh when these kind of large speed fight happens the time dilates so it becomes like bullet time which both helps the sequencing of the state transitions but also gives people a bit of a different pace to call the shots. Um so um so uh I mean we we've kind of had unlocks over the period of time in kind of raising the ceiling on how big these can become. But uh it is always a bit of a nail piping moment when when people are close to setting a new record on just how will the servers uphold there's been a mixture of hardware and software innovations to make this

possible etc. But then we also focus a lot on just like DAU which for E is probably more like weekly active than daily active. Um obviously day one retention, day seven retention, day 30 retention, focus a lot on that. Um I mean of course we like any company look at our pubu LTV those kind of things. Um we uh very much focus on people being flying their spaceships in space. Often the game can be played sort of you can be in a station which is kind of a safe haven and you're kind of chatting with your friends uh or spinning your spaceship which is an oddly comforting and endearing thing to do spaceship spinning. Uh but we want you to be in space because the the game is ultimately a game of kind of uh players versus players kind of space survival. Um, so how many how many people are

flying in space is another KPI we we focus on.
Very cool. Yeah. So some standard ones and some certainly some very special ones. I love the transactions per section uh per per second. And um yeah, I think it's important to kind of like understand from the you know there's obviously business KPIs, but then there's also gameplay insights and sort of like what are people doing and how that could inform um business insights. So I think that's very very cool. Um,
all right. In our headquarters in Iceland, we have like a pretty cool solar system map that shows every death in re real time into our canteen.
So, when we're having food, we are watching kind of murder and mayhem in real time happening uh in in the new solar system. [laughter and gasps]
That's awesome. Um, okay. So, that kind of fully wraps us up to current day. Um, and I we're going to talk a little bit about the relationship between Eve Online and EF Frontier in the second section. Um, sorry, in the section after

this one, but I want to sort of talk a little bit about Eve Frontier. Um, and just a reminder for the audience, Eve Frontier is basically a version of Eve that's going to be built on the blockchain. And Hillar, like I wanted to ask you sort of when you started thinking about the blockchain just in general. Um, you had already successfully built a game on the on the database, the SQL server as you mentioned. Um, and why were you even thinking about building a game on the blockchain? And like where in time or sorry when in time did you start thinking about it? So the first time I started thinking about it for reals um is that um well I mean it maybe starts a little bit earlier. So I think it is about 2009. I um I have the receipt in terms of an image. I I start to make this local for Eve which has the infinity symbol in it. Um and and I start to think about like

okay 2009 the game's been running for like six years. um which felt like forever to me um in my kind of shipping 27 and like your horizon is maybe 5 years. I I recall our wildest ideas for even online was it was going to go on for 5 years. That that that was our wildest like Excel model was like we're going to peak at 150,000 subscribers and then we're going to taper out for 5 years and that that was the extent of our imagination. I mean really honest. I mean we had some awake ideas that maybe that was just to put it in a box that fit into Excel but it was just unprecedented that game a game would go on for decades. It it was just I mean sure like some single player games did exist. I mean uh people are even playing the original Elite today. I I could probably find one DAU just today

somewhere in that. But this idea like a virtual or words was going on for decades was just uh it broke the imagination. But there in 2009 I was like this could just go on forever. Uh we make this logo. We start to talk about demon line forever as the vision for the game etc. But um uh then in 2015, somebody explains to me how you could store other things than the value of Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain. So the Bitcoin protocol actually is quite flexible. uh the lightning network is implemented on top of the fact you can interpret inspect outputs for many different things and there were even games uh using that as persistency layer as as um uh for games [snorts] and uh and somebody was explaining this to me and I was like hm this is interesting maybe

this u this idea might play a part in the foreverness maybe like Bitcoin blockchain could be like cold storage for E9 spaceship. And I was thinking some like wormhole mechanics of like you could tend your spaceship to cold storage by opening up a wormhole and then you could take it out of like I was having just sort of fantasies about this in the context of forever. Like I mean forever like if you truly want to go forever then like the weirdest things become issues like the fact we have a database somewhere in the docklands area and if that goes away soon we have backups and all that but I mean the company might be a risk factor because companies don't last forever when not everyone is like Nintendo has been making some kind of games for over 200 years. So, so this kind of stack of like um forever and very much obviously Bitcoin was kind of touted us through

decentralization and full to tolerance it's unstoppable which I think I mean to a large extent has still held up true and I mean if they come up with a good kind of quantum safe accurate to it at some point it's hard to really see how it it's ever going to stop. Um so that's where kind of first okay then I take a look at it then was like ah okay oh that's it's very esoteric this might not be a thing to be actually doing but u that was a bit of a seat that kind of um got stuck in my brain then um when Ethereum comes out with smart contracts then it was just okay interesting like Ethereum in a way if Bitcoin is like database. Ethereum is kind of like a computer and it's kind of like at time like a very little Raspberry Pi level of of like TPS that

the whole world is sharing one Raspberry Pi. But it's kind of an interesting concept especially with the smart contracts and um what I came to appreciate is that smart contracts on Ethereum are a piece of software that lives in an economically adverse environment like um it's economic warfare between different applications on Ethereum implemented our smart contract and that layer has largely held that you cannot cross over a medi and stuff like And I was like, okay, this could maybe become a modding platform where um and at the time and still today, we have like an API gateway where thousands of people have been writing kind of uh companion software in the form of websites and all sorts of applications for a line. But uh we're very hesitant to allow that to write into the world state. It's largely just reading back from the world state.

it we can allow it to ride into the world states because we're using a database but it's it it is something you have to deeply think of ahead of time and I was like okay maybe this foreverness in the decentralization idea maybe the smart contracts can become a ming platform and then obviously as like every MMO I'm sure you experienced this when you were working on play art has real money trading happening whether we like it uh and of course on we fight it in our ULI. It's not allowed. We chase people down that are doing it. It never really felt like a good solution to be fighting your code of customer base. But just like the the kind of motability writing into the world state and uh early money trading and the things I mean actual value the these are very challenging things to retrofit into a 20-year-old game because people have

expected a certain thing. It's technically complicated. It's legally complicated. So, so I at that point started to think about, okay, if we were to make another game like now 20 years later, do we have enough of a foundation to warranted existence? So if we combine this kind of decentralization, smart contracts as modding um and u real money trading just kind of using mainly the legal framework around blockchains in the context of a game. It's actually less of a technical thing than a legal thing. technical helps a bit on it, but it's mainly the legal framing like u cryptocurrencies and blockchains are another chapter of the law than virtual items in a game.
Mhm.
Um and then I have like a long kind of list of like all the things if I have the time machine written ted on my

metaphorical arm of like if I have the time machine what what do I go and do different on kind of various mechanisms in the game. And 20 years into it, it did feel like, okay, maybe this weren't um making what I think about like a new city. I very much think of human line like a city. Often kind of thought about the metaphor of what is it really? I'm a CEO of a company that takes care of online. What am I really? Am I president? Am I like what am I? and a mayor of a city always felt very very apt because what people um tend to obsess about are all the little things about living in a virtual world like just like you do in a city. I'm now in London was taking the subway this morning and it was late and there was cancelled line and like there was a crowd I was late for a meeting like this is my experience of the city of London. or it's great

when the subs are on time when it's not like and I become angry at the the mayor in some metaphor of like why can't you have the trains run on time
and this is very much the experience and the energy we feel from each players
like that I see they they care mostly I mean they care about the big things but mostly like viscerally
uh the the actual
the things that impact their everyday life
is the quality of life of playing the game
that not being frustrating and that mainly being addressed if it is frustrating. So anyway, uh it's a city. Then I started to think about okay if L is Rome then okay a new city would be like New York and I kind of like using that as as an analogy because I mean New York feels like an Italian city a little bit to me like uh and I think the some of the fonting cohorts were Italians. Um, so, so thinking about it like that, okay, now we have new building

materials. We're building skyscrapers and elevators and all that, but Rome is still still awesome with a coliseum and like many amazing things. The best concrete ever like uh and um an amazing place. And these cities coexist in our world and they're separate, they're different and the overall world is is more rich because they both exist. So while I mean as soon as we ship people online people are coming to us so when is Eve 2 coming out and we very much res resisted that idea and it doesn't really feel like that to us. I mean uh we're also very inspired by Wow Classic as you were referencing like uh Wow Classic became like a a way to tap into a certain type of feeling again.
Yeah, absolutely. uh our customer base and the nostalgia cohort for World of Warcraft is very big due to the way that they've rolled out with the boxes and the 30,000 copies and all that. The nostalgia cohort for OG online is a little different, but the nostalgia of

exploring a new world with new mechanics and all that does when I play Frontier, it tickles my nostalgia in a in a in the way of like I don't really know what's going on. And even if I'm very much involved in making that game, I don't really know what's going on. It's all procedurally generated. Like it's 100,000 solar systems. There are three black holes in the sector wrecking chaos all over the place. Obviously, all the mods and things that people are doing make the game even wilder. So, so it becomes a little bit like the original moment of discovering a new world for Eve played again kind of 20 some years later.
Yeah. So, it sounds like basically, and this was going to be a question for later on, but you're not going to shut down Eve Online and Frontier. There's it's it's Rome and it's New York. Um, and I think it's very similar to the Blizzard pattern, I think, for when we launched WoW Classic. Um, there was a very there's a lot of questions about

are we going to merge this back? Are we going to just go to or after Classic? Do we go to Mists? Like, are we going to keep going in the same living the same history over and over again? Um, but it sounds like so that these are going to be mutual communities. And of course, you know, I have questions about cannibalization and migration between the two cities perhaps that might impact cannibalization, but I still kind of want to address, you know, you talked about you investigated um Bitcoin, right? investigated Ethereum. Um, and you've recently made the public um, announcement that you'll be building on SUI. Um, and a lot of the premise of this is to obviously build first a sophisticated open trading economy, right? To kind of uh, I guess give the players what they were doing anyway, which was real money trading. Um, that's the first that's one of the reasons. The second reason is to avoid, I guess, reliance on your own servers and something that could potentially live forever past the dissolution of the company or, you know, let's just say

like a like you said in our kickoff of Meteor Hits Iceland um kind of kind of setup. But are you not concerned that even though the blockchain is less centralized, there are still centralized rules that like you know a protocol chooses to elect towards that's there's a reason why you chose SU over Ethereum. Um, and how do you guys think about that? Do you think about that as like another dependency? And do you think that you'll be able to build a business on a fully onchain game that you think is going to be sustainable? Because, you know, you talked a lot about what does this does this warrant the investment? Um,
yeah. So, uh, not only warrant the investment, does it warrant does it have permission to exist? Because like for Frontier to coexist with demon line like it is it is living with a rather legendary alter sibling so to speak,
right?
Um it is [laughter]
it is quite the thing to to hold a a

small candle to even line. So um I mean we have to think deeply about it. Why does it really um warrant to exist? And I think I mean there are several like technical and technocratic elements that uh that I mentioned but I think one of the things that immediately came to mind is this genre of survival games that uh it is similar to MMOs but it's a very different feeling that um when you play a survival game. So we very much wanted to kind of explore this feeling of survival. U E1 line is like um space opera like it's a massive bustling world with trillions of people. It's very much kind of a think sci-fi sort of analogy is the Hyperion Cosly

science fiction book written in the very late 80s. boggles the mind that somebody could uh or Dan Simmons could p write it in I think 89 and it very much describes this kind of cultured burstling world and evil line is that of course with city dark underbelly and all the spectrum of of kind of civilization but it but it is a very civilized world. Um whereas in frontier we are we are living in a space apocalyptic broken world like uh it's a world that takes place or it's a premise that take place around three black holes locked in a kind of a three body dark kind of macab um and um and that raos around it. So uh but people want to be there to mine the riches you can get out of the rifts of space happen around those three black holes but it is very much a colony that

is always being ruined. So when you play Frontier you are you are in a post-apocalyp apocalyptic kind of mad maxi survival feeling. It is not a bustling metropolis. you are like again taking New York as an example I I think about like three Daniel T Lewis movies you can be in the last moan you can be in there Will Be Blood or you can be in Gangs of New York and you're somewhere between Last Mo and there Will Be Blood um think about like when he's he's digging up the T in the well and the bucket and beam fall on him and he breaks his leg and he's like crawling out of the well with like blood and oil and it's like clipping back to town. That's the feeling we're going for like uh and then I mean eventually I I predict it will move more into Can of New York but we're

very much taking it all the way there. you're in the beginning and it's very much about the harshness of space, the evilness of the atropy of space and it's very much it's a it's a world that is grinding you down. It's hostile and it's evil and it's angry. This is like the the sort of brand logo or or like the theme logo frontier. It's always kind of like this is the feeling we're going on. the the actual game logo is a little more sort of sort of evil line inspired, but this is what they put on the t-shirts and and this is the con contrast like u it's a it's an evil world that wants to kill you and everyone there wants to kill you uh uh if the world wasn't crazy enough and all the machine life that live there then the other people certainly are going to kill you. Uh, so it's a very angry and evil game and and you could say, "What the fuck?" Like, uh, "Wasn't Evil

Land hardcore enough?" No,
hardcore enough.
Like [laughter] that that
that is our analysis. Even Line just wasn't hardcore enough. Uh, but again, in our madness of forever, if that like there is this element of the world needs to present the problem. the world is a problem statement that we want to have endured forever because in what you were challenging me on I mean aren't there several points of centralization and things and things that challenge that for sure and probably the biggest challenge especially when the world u becomes autonomous when all of us disappear and the world is autonomous which will take decades by the way but we need to imbune it with a problem statement kind of like our own world which seems stupidly big. I mean if you look at the play space of our universe it's like

it bokeles the mind like who designed this? This is a little too much.
Yeah. Yeah,
dude. Like what where were you going for? like there's no way we will solve the the galaxies or galaxies and the universe of universe that we live in and we haven't got quite there yet but uh we've taken a a good mark at it. What is a game that will puzzle um an audience for u for decades and and centuries to come?
And the and the blockchain I guess is a part of that hardcordness for you. So uh the blockchain is more about the moability. It's more about the legal framework for true player ownership. Uh decentralization plays a part into the foreverness. I mean this element that we the creator can enshrine things onto the blockchain where it is mutable and we

can can't change it after a point in time. In the beginning, we will probably have like uh kind of keys to go and modify, but eventually we will throw the keys away and certain parts of the world state become immutable. We've developed a framework we call digital physics where over time we can solidify layers upon layers of the game and that becomes immutable and people can still build new features on top of it. um are also going to make it all open source. So again in this disaster scenario as we were talking about if a meteor hits Iceland or one of its many volcanoes blows up which is probably more probable uh then all the the things should be there for Eve to live on uh
past an extinction event like that.
Yeah. And I think there's like there's definitely something beautiful to that. I mean, when you when you kind of when

you pin E Frontier as a mirror of our world, right? Like you can't change history. Like JFK was assassinated. It is immutable, right? Like this thing happened in the past. It was immutable. Whereas obviously in a lot of video games, you're like, "Ah, we launched this character and it was doing way too much damage. So now we'll go back and we'll change it and we'll recorrect the future, right? As a better way for the world to as to make it a better environment." But I think that there's something hard, obviously hardcore about things becoming immutable in the game and we don't change the past and we just move on and we play in this world that we've created for ourselves. Um, and so but I do have kind of a question before we talk a little bit about also the speed of development between the two games and then we'll kind of go into our closing questions about the gaming industry. But you just mentioned what the Eve is notorious for its steep learning curve and hardcore community. This is even more hardcore perhaps. um and your resolution was that Eve Online wasn't hardcore enough and we need to make something even more hardcore. Um but I guess a question to you is that if

you want the game to live forever, um you probably need to build a new generation of fans and we spoke early on in the beginning that people will find it challenging to onboard into Eve Online. Um, do you have this fear that perhaps the only people that will play Frontier are the people who played online and then you're actually diminishing the population of the people that are fans and then how is the world going to live forever if you don't have a robust number of CCU playing all the time and because the game is so hard to get into. How do you guys think about that?
Yeah. Um, so there are several ways to think about that. Like one is the ensemble I mentioned earlier. We have people in their early 20s on our council of stellar amongstment. So um people are definitely joining you online on year 20 turning 23 now last May.
Mhm.
So um so I mean that is out there. Then I take inspiration from things which are extremely hard but have been adopted

into the mainstream over time.
Um one example is running a marathon. So the first person that runs a marathon literally dies from it like running from marathon.
I was just talking about this the other day with my friends about how strange the marathon is running [laughter] which is out in this context of like running from marathon to Rome to make known that
an invasion was coming and dice. Um then like today it would not be an unreasonable thing for my mom to run a marathon. Uh I mean people in their 70s and 80s are finishing marathons and they never made the marathon shorter. Um but there is something that happened in the world that through training social organization normalization etc. it became an a reasonable thing for a grandma to finish a marathon and left from first person trying dying 2,000

years later everyone is doing it um and then okay now maraphones have been normalized completely and there's a huge one here in London uh that u is overs subscribed and you need like lotteryies and whatever to to get a hit. So um millions of people all over the planet uh run marathons. They run multiple marathons per year. So then okay marathons are obviously not hard enough. Then people came up with iron man. So the marathon is just a cherry on top of the swimming and the biking and okay that was in the love. Now people do like um 500 miles running in the desert somewhere uh where you're like have to sleep while you're running in cotton swat like we just have this tendency of taking something extremely hardcore to the point of dying in the first beta test to the point of normalizing and

then making it harder and harder and harder and I think people will be running marathons forever. Um [snorts] so that's one. Then I'm very inspired by the game of chess having like a mecca moment in the world today like chess.com I don't know has like 100 million meu or something
it it is
I've had uh the CEO actually of chess.com on our show
amazing whatever those peeps are doing I want to I want to repeat some of that like in the in the 4,000 years of chess and in the 4,000 years of human line I for sure human line hope that line can take from chess chess and having its biggest day in the sun 4,000 years from now like chess has and again they never made chess easier like um I mean uh there have been like little tweaks like fish around them and things like that but mostly the game is the same game people have been playing for for 4,000 years. Um Test.com did a really good job on kind of matchmaking

and leaderboards and like all these kind of things and kind of making it accessible for people. So, I think we see this time and time again. People take something hardcore and obscure. Uh, I mean, this t-shirt is a little bit sort of Norwegian death metal inspired. I mean, that used to be an absolute n obscure thing and maybe the Norwegian death metal version of metal is still a bit out there, but I mean, my god, like I mean, Metal has been taking mainstream uh to no end. I mean, Metallica was the biggest touring band in the world uh for a good amount of time and um fashion trends are were and still are kind of heavy metal even today. So, we're just not afraid of this concept of even if it looks like super weird and hardcore today, it might not be that when it diffuses into mainstream like marathon, jazz and Norwegian death metal.
Interesting. Okay. So, I think that's

where it is. you have this belief or your assumption case is that people gravitate towards that over time rather than like perceiving the world as static because I think the I we could probably talk about this for forever but we I'm going to get to the our last questions um but uh you know for myself you know there's a even there's a culling right as you graduate from marathon to Iron Man Iron Man to super Iron Man where the population gets diminishingly smaller right and the my I guess my core question would be like can effier if it's that if you're the if if the parallel is the top, you know, 500 people who decide that Iron Man isn't enough for them and they need to run Super Iron Man. Um, you know, how can you make sure that, uh, there's enough people in that world to make sure it's populous enough that it's like the game doesn't, you know, many games die. They have 3,000 CCU and they die on the Vine. Um, that's sort of I think we could probably talk that out for a while, but [laughter]
yeah. So, [clears throat] I have actually never run a marathon, but I've done half an Iron Man twice.

Uh and when I did it in its time, oh my god, uh the cities they took place in were like packed with people. Um when I went and did it, there was a party of people coming with us and I don't know how much I paid to the entry organi entry fee for the organization of Iron Man. And uh and that whole ecosystem is massive. Like it's massive and it continues to grow to a point where it's somewhat problematic. Like um the the the um the places where they run these tournaments are packed. Like there isn't enough play space in the world to run all these iron man contests uh to meet the the the demand for Iron Man. and they're still kind of kind of early in their marathon journey. Uh so like don't knock that out. I the the the calling doesn't necessarily work how you

think it works. Like uh there are 8 billion people you're calling from from you're not calling from one coast over to another. So I'm just not really a big believer that we are subdividing. I I think we're doing something different. Rome will be Rome, New York will be New York. And um people pick their city based on kind of what they what they like or they might even switch uh do a bit of
both.
Yeah. Do a bit of both. [laughter] And I was thinking which would you sum it in? Like uh probably wrong. Uh
I don't know. I I love it only. Well, I mean I've been in New York in all seasons. It kind of [laughter] has a vibe in all seasons.
It does. It It does have a vibe. As someone who lives in New York, it has a vibe in all seasons, of course. Um, but okay. Um, yeah, I'm sure that we could talk this out forever. I love this analogy. Um, uh, one quick question before we move on to some final questions about the gaming industry. Uh, how many in terms of team, right? Like you launch Eve with three 30 people. Um,

how big is CCP today and who is working on Eve Online and who is working on Eve Frontier if you just had to split the team?
So, or everybody's working on both?
Yeah, CCP overall is 400 people. Um so I mean uh the dev team on line is about 100 people. We have like a core development team which is like 20 or 30. Uh we have customer support publishing which split their time a little bit. It tends to be more on the publishing side but we keep the teams very separate. So uh the core frontier team is 50 people. So kind of half the team a little bit bigger than the initial development team, but we wanted to keep it pretty lean. Um it's when you're discovering a new thing, it is not something you scale uh out the gate. I mean even line can have 100 developers work on the game. I mean there's a lot of process. There's a

lot of like organic understanding of what line is and what it needs. And we have a lot of engagement with the community such as the CSM and all various ways to kind of source where we need to focus on in Eve. [snorts] So we can have more developers on if um yeah we have 50 people um the core development team uh probably works more on Frontier right now because it's it's a way to push our core technology uh which we then can backport into Eve. For example, Eve still runs on Python 2.7 or like a it's called a stackless version of Python. It's a very special version of Python, but we for E Frontier, we bit the bullet, then upgraded to Python 3 12. I think we're on right now. So, we've done these kind of things which are hard to do in the live environment of Eve. We have kind of spiked with frontier proven in it out think we will backport it which you can

almost kind of think in my New York uh Rome analogy for sure. I mean it didn't put like skyscrapers on the coliseum but now that New York exists all cities of the world take inspiration from the fact that it does exist and you think differently about what the city is because of you have both to pull ideas from. So um yeah that's the rough split. Uh then here where I am in London we have uh about 17 people working on a shooter which we are kind of creating a very innovative thing called Eanguard. We're actually merging E online and evangart into one kind of platform using the the play space of Eon line. It's basically a game that takes place on a planet on E line. So it's another way to kind of break the paradigm a little bit of what the game can be. Now we have kind of two games sharing an environment in uh with Eland and Eve Bank Vanguard uh sharing an economy. So I mean we're

doing all sorts of crazy things. Um got it. Okay. Very cool. All right. So we're going to close with some questions about the gaming industry. Um probably about two just given that we're short on time. But um my first question is you know you guys have done this tremendous job of retaining this insane community for like over two decades at this point. Um and there's this in the past 5 to 10 years or so um there's been a new development and nent community building philosophy right build in public build alongside your community. Um what do you think today's modern-day developers should learn from Eve's social design and how does that impact um the way they should do development today which might be different than they had done AAA or double A in the past 20 years. Mhm.
Well, I mean, e online was always kind of built in public. Um the out the gate we were um um I mean uh

so we have like an alpha test of online in like 2001 we've been doing it for one year and immediately as we saw that like the alpha test feedback actually we we just had people in Iceland in the alpha test and they just came to our office to give feedback was a very in hindsight must wait to do it. Uh even if well I mean it was kind of out of necessity. The the net wasn't like super proliferated. Um um and then we did a fairly long kind of beta test. We ran a beta test from like January 20 till May when it comes out. That was a long beta test back then. Um and then I mean the game has kind of been building in the open in a in an kind of an extreme sport uh way ever since. So I think in many ways the world has kind of been uh adopting our

playbook more than anything else. For sure we have learned many different things from K industry overall but it feels like people are more or less sort of catching up to that way of building things and I guess now with the extreme opinionated feedbackdriven nature of the internet any game is kind of building in the open whether they like it or not like the you even see I mean one of my favorite games in recent times is Elen Ring and when you play Elden Ring it is like, okay, this game is obviously designed for the construct where the internet exists because some of the obscurity in this game can only be explained by some people going like way deeper than I will ever have time for. I will not get all the references from all the inspiration that from software has taken to make this game happen. But man, do I appreciate people to lay all that lore in some YouTube videos on and all the little obscure

things you can do and kind of I mean sometimes when I play in the game like following all these quest lines, they're so obscure and kind of hard to follow, which I kind of like. I mean, I kind of like the fact that it has it doesn't have an instructor me. It doesn't have like interest question marks on the map, whatever. But sometimes I dabble in just okay, catch me up here. What's really going?
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean that's that's an example of nobody would make a game like that unless the internet existed. like you have to make the game so en enigmatic
so that a group of people can figure it out the game together and with her async mechanic of like hits and all that and the fact it's all on YouTube and Reddit and what is kind of like a construct of you need to make the game harder
but the internet exists so I think everyone is kind of building in the open
so so whether you acknowledge it or not

you are Yeah. Okay. All right. And then last question is if you had to summarize the current state of the gaming industry in one or two sentence, uh what one or two sentences, how would you do that? And what is the biggest change the game industry is about to face that game developers need to be ready for but they are not?
So I I think there are two vectors going on in gaming right now. Um there are games which are highly retractive uh like an E9 but obviously the bigger ones are Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite. Um they have been coined the black hole games but I would call Evil 9 the OG black hole game [laughter] but uh they others are bigger. I give them that. Um these young upstarts um but uh so that's one. Uh then we have a discovery problem in games like there are um hundreds of thousands of mobile

games uh released every year. Last year 18,000 games per released on Steam. I think the study is there's a $100 listing fee on Steam and I think it's only a few hundred games out of those 18,000 games that made back the listing fee. Uh so well done Valve and having a listing fee and um and uh but the discovery is broken like um neither mobile platforms nor Steam are built for this scenario where tens of thousands of games are being released every year. Some of it is various type of I'm going to go out on a limb and call it slop. uh uh obviously not all 18,000 games but some ratio of them were human created slop we are now entering an era where human created AI assisted

manufacturing on game will games will reach some epic proportion and that will make the discovery problem even more challenging. So uh um and I think the discovery problem is maybe a meta concept of fighting for attention. So I think our attentions as humans living on planet earth in 2025 there are high demands on our attention. Think we can all relate. I mean it's the new cycle. It's all the social media. It's all the amazing games in my Steam library. I will never have time to play. H it's uh it's my own life. It's my family. It's my job. It's uh it's a lot. Um so I think we are just in a in a in a very very challenging time of cutting through when it comes to attention and discovery and it ain't getting easier. So uh I think uh games are affected by

this but so is all form of media. So uh we feel it now both on uh frankly on all our gangs. What used to be a playbook for getting people's attention to join something new is out the window like uh we're we're off the map. You need to reinvent everything.
Really interesting. Yeah. I mean I completely agree with everything you said. Um and it's a really hard problem to find a solution to um given the state of distribution um given its consolidation around a fair two two stores on the PC market, two stores in the mobile market, two consoles um and it's it's a really big challenge and I think you're I think you're I think I agree there's just an oversaturation of games and you know in an oversaturated world how do you make sure that your thing gets is the thing that gets seen and it's not easy. Um, but anyway, we are well over time. Um, Hillmar, this

was so enjoyable. I bet I could probably go back and forth with you for for hours more. Um, I think what you guys are doing with Eve Frontier and the blockchain and um is so interesting and thank you so much for coming on and uh talking with me about the history of CCP and what you guys where you guys are going next. It was such a pleasure.
Yes, very enjoyed to talk a lot.
Awesome. Okay. Well, as always friends, that's the top of our episode. Um, if you have feedback or ideas, please hit me up at alexander navoc.co. I'm always open. And with that, um, we're out. I will see you next time. Thank you. If you enjoyed today's episode, whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app, make sure to like, subscribe, comment, or give a fivestar review. And if you want to reach out or provide feedback, shoot us a note at [email protected] or find us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Plus, if you want to learn more about what Navic has to offer, make sure to check out our website, www.navic.co.

There you can sign up for the number one games industry newsletter, Navic Digest, or contact us to learn about our wide-ranging consulting and advisory services. Again, that is www.navic.co. [music] Thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.