Highlights
- CCP Games has rebranded as Fenris Creations following a $120M buyout from Pearl Abyss.
- Google DeepMind is taking a minority stake to use EVE Online as an AI research environment.
- No layoffs or restructuring planned, and the headquarters stays in Reykjavík with studios in London and Shanghai.
EVE Online developer CCP Games has rebranded as Fenris Creations following a $120M separation from South Korean parent company Pearl Abyss. The Reykjavík-based studio announced the change on May 6, returning to independent ownership under its senior management and long-term investors.
As part of the transition, Google has taken a minority stake in the company tied to a research partnership with Google DeepMind.
CCP Games’ Split from Pearl Abyss
Pearl Abyss acquired CCP in 2018 for $425M. After a joint strategic review, both companies concluded that independent ownership was better suited to Fenris Creations' long-term direction, while Pearl Abyss refocuses on its own IP. The $120M transaction includes both cash and non-cash consideration. As of now, there are no layoffs planned, and studios in Reykjavík, London, and Shanghai continue operating without changes.
The studio enters this new chapter from a commercially strong position. EVE Online posted its second-highest revenue quarter ever in Q4 2025, with November setting a single-month record. Full-year 2025 revenue came in above $70M. Two new titles are in development: EVE Vanguard, an extraction FPS, and EVE Frontier, a space survival game.
EVE Vanguard seeks to compete with the likes of Marathon and ARC Raiders in the extraction shooter space. EVE Frontier is similar to No Man’s Sky, with more gameplay systems centered around space exploration and resource management.
What Google DeepMind Gets Out of Eve Online
The AI research partnership with Google DeepMind focuses on long-horizon planning, memory, and continual learning, using EVE Online's player-driven economy and complex social systems as a test environment. DeepMind will work with an offline version of the game running on local servers.
Games have long served as proving grounds for AI research. DeepMind's own history runs through Atari DQN, AlphaGo, AlphaStar, and SIMA. What makes EVE unusual as a research environment is its scale and open-endedness. Unlike games like chess or Go, EVE has no fixed end state. Players run corporations, wage wars, manipulate markets, and form alliances that persist over years.
Training models in that kind of environment pushes toward the kind of general, adaptive intelligence that narrow benchmarks cannot replicate. For DeepMind, EVE is less a game than a simulation of emergent human behavior at scale, which is exactly what makes it interesting.
