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Getting Started August 12, 2026 7 min read

Who Makes EVE Frontier? CCP Games, Now Fenris Creations

EVE Frontier is made by CCP Games, the Icelandic studio behind EVE Online, except that sentence is now out of date in an interesting way: as of May 2026 the company is called Fenris Creations. Same studio, same people, same Reykjavik headquarters, new name, new owners, and a research partnership with Google DeepMind that I did not have on my bingo card. I've been a customer of this studio on and off since 2003, when I bought EVE Online as a physical box in a shop, so I thought it was worth writing down who actually makes this game and what just happened to them.

The studio, briefly

CCP was founded in Reykjavik in 1997, and EVE Online launched in May 2003. In my head they've always sat in the same mental league as Electronic Arts or Blizzard, maybe not financially, but as one of those long-established studios you simply know. Over the years they tried other things with mixed luck: DUST 514, a PS3 shooter tied into EVE Online that ran from 2013 to 2016, the VR dogfighter EVE Valkyrie which I genuinely enjoyed, and a World of Darkness MMO that was cancelled in 2014. Through all of it, EVE Online kept running, which after 23 years is its own kind of achievement. Today the company is about 350 people across Reykjavik, London and Shanghai, and alongside EVE Online it runs EVE Frontier and the upcoming shooter EVE Vanguard.

In 2018 the Korean publisher Pearl Abyss bought CCP in a deal reported as worth up to $425 million, structured as $225.9 million up front plus up to $200 million in performance earn-outs, and later reporting on Pearl Abyss's filings suggests those earn-outs never paid out. That detail matters for reading what happened next.

The buyout

At the end of April 2026, Pearl Abyss disclosed it was selling CCP back to the company's own management for $120 million, structured as $100 million in cash plus $20 million in token acquisition rights, and the deal closed on 6 May. The buyout was led by Hilmar Veigar Petursson, the CEO who has run the studio for over two decades, with senior management and long-term investors alongside. Pearl Abyss's public framing was that selling to management was in the best interest of both companies, and the financial press pointed at years of operating losses under their ownership as the likely reason. So the studio Pearl Abyss paid $225.9 million up front for in 2018 bought itself back for $120 million eight years later, and is now independent for the first time since.

The genuinely surprising part was buried in the same announcement: Google took a minority stake, attached to a research partnership with Google DeepMind. The stated plan is to use an offline EVE Online server as a research environment for AI work on long-horizon planning, memory and continual learning. Whatever you think of AI research, the pitch writes itself, because there aren't many places you can drop an agent into a 23-year-old economy shaped by a quarter of a million scheming humans.

Why "Fenris Creations"?

On 6 May, the same day the deal closed, the company announced it was renaming itself Fenris Creations. Not a parent label, not a new division: the whole company. The games keep their names, so it's still EVE Online and EVE Frontier, made by Fenris Creations, and ccpgames.com now literally redirects to fenris.com. The name is from Norse mythology, and per the company its first game back in 1997 carried Fenris on the box, so there's a thread of history to it.

The stated reason for dropping CCP is the one I'd have guessed, and Hilmar said it plainly in interviews: the acronym had become a real problem because of the Chinese Communist Party. He described reporters calling them "the other CCP" and employees being questioned about the name at the US border. When your company shares initials with a geopolitical flashpoint, a 30-year-old brand starts costing more than it's worth. The company also said explicitly there were no layoffs and no restructuring attached, just the name and the ownership.

Did anything actually change?

Here's my honest report from inside the official Discord, where the devs are active daily: no. The name prefixes on their Discord accounts flipped from CCP to FC overnight and everything else carried on exactly as before. Same people, same cadence, same tone. Which tells you something about the Pearl Abyss years too, I think. If the parent company had been steering day to day, you'd expect an ownership change of this size to be visible from the outside, and it just wasn't. They were clearly being left to get on with it before, and they're getting on with it now.

Community reaction was quieter than you'd expect for news this size. The DeepMind stake was mostly read as a no-brainer, money for access to a server, essentially. There are naysayers on Reddit doing arithmetic on the buyout and concluding the studio must now launch EVE Frontier within a year or run out of money, and I'd treat that with heavy scepticism, because they're a private company and none of us can see the actual balance sheet. What I'd say is that being independent cuts both ways: nobody upstairs to please, and nobody upstairs to absorb a bad year either. If you want to know what that might mean for timelines, I've written separately about when EVE Frontier might actually release.

The Frontier connection

The reason all this belongs on a blog about an EVE Frontier map tool is that the new structure keeps pointing at Frontier. The token acquisition rights in the sale price refer to the game's planned EVE token. And in August 2026 the company announced a former Icelandic government minister, Aslaug Arna Sigurbjornsdottir, joining as Senior Director of AI Partnerships, with a research initiative that names EVE Frontier's live economy as a proving ground for autonomous AI agents, building on the DeepMind partnership. Hilmar's line was that every major advance in AI has required a new proving ground and that persistent virtual worlds are the next one. On the Discord this landed with mild excitement about the prospect of properly clever NPCs and not much else, and honestly, in a community where every announcement usually finds its critics, quiet might be the most positive reaction there is.

So that's who makes EVE Frontier. A 29-year-old studio, newly independent, newly renamed, with Google DeepMind looking over its shoulder and a blockchain game as its bet on the next 20 years. I said in my comparison of the two games that EVE Online is this studio's history and I'd like to think EVE Frontier is its future. Six months into the Fenris era, I still would.

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