Recently Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games, shared insights into the future of EVE Online and the company’s blockchain-enabled project, with our partner site PCGamesInsider.biz.
With Project Awakening, the Icelandic MMO studio is now exploring blockchain technology to create a unique, community-driven experience. The project aims to leverage blockchain’s robustness and distributed development capabilities while open-sourcing its Carbon engine to encourage player participation in world creation.
“We aim for everything around EVE Online to go on forever,” said Pétursson.
“Blockchain is a good way to store value in a very anti-fragile way.”
The experimentation does not affect the original Tranquility server (“there’s no reason to change the database as it is”) but CCP has a small team looking to leverage the capabilities of blockchain. In fact, they started looking at Bitcoin and its Lightning Network as early as 2015.
“There was a bit of a budding game scene there. We have been interested in the persistence of virtual goods in the grander sense, obviously, for decades,” he explained.
“There are also technical pieces around blockchain that are quite interesting from a computer science standpoint. As we went deeper and deeper into this, we saw more and more opportunities to do something super-unique. So we started playtesting. The first playtest was December ’22. We had 2,000 people play for two weeks. And now we’re announcing that we’re inviting 5,000 people to play for six weeks on May 21st. We will also concurrently hold a hackathon while the playtest is being orchestrated, so people can extend the experience on their own, permissionless, completely free, as the game is running.”
The huge community-run aspects of the EVE universe make it fertile ground for blockchain experimentation. “If you look at the average EVE alliance, they practically already have an IT department to run their infrastructure,” said Pétursson.
“[They] are often run from a database, working with an API gateway into the database for Tranquillity, the main server for EVE Online. But now you can develop all those alliance infrastructure tools, basically on-chain, through smart contracts, and through UI frameworks that we’ve added.”
You can read the rest of the interview at PCGamesInsider.biz, which covers the testing phase of new shooter game EVE Vanguard. Pétursson discusses the challenges in onboarding new players (although up to a million people try EVE Online for the first time each year) and looks at the role of other disruptive technologies, like AI, in game development.