On May 6, 2026, the studio formerly known as CCP Games announced its rebranding as Fenris Creations and a $120 million buyout from Pearl Abyss. Simultaneously, Google DeepMind took a minority stake and entered a research partnership, gaining access to an offline version of EVE Online to train and evaluate AI models inside one of gaming's most complex persistent universes.
Key takeaways
- Buyout from Pearl Abyss valued at $120 million — comprising cash and non-cash elements
- Google DeepMind takes a minority stake — value described as "in the millions of dollars"
- Research partnership will focus on long-horizon planning, memory, and continual learning
- DeepMind will run experiments on a local, offline server — no impact on live game or players
- Fenris Creations retains existing leadership and studios in Reykjavík, London, and Shanghai
From CCP Games to Fenris Creations
For 26 years, the studio operated under the name CCP Games. Founded in Reykjavík in 1997, it earned global recognition primarily through EVE Online — a massively multiplayer space MMORPG launched in 2003. Since 2018, the controlling stake had been held by South Korean company Pearl Abyss, which had acquired CCP the previous year for approximately $425 million.
The May 6 announcement marks a complete ownership restructuring. Fenris Creations reverts to a model similar to pre-2018: senior management and long-term investors regain control, while Pearl Abyss exits by mutual agreement. No layoffs, no restructuring. Headquarters remains in Vatnsmýrin, Iceland.
EVE Online as an AI Research Environment
The partnership with Google DeepMind is the strategic centerpiece of the announcement. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, commented directly:
"Games have always been a huge part of my life — I've been a gamer since I was a kid, and I started my career designing and programming complex AI simulation games like Theme Park. They've also been at the heart of many of Google DeepMind's breakthroughs — like Atari DQN, AlphaGo, AlphaStar and SIMA — because they're the perfect training ground for developing and testing AI algorithms."
Hassabis places EVE Online alongside Atari, AlphaGo, and AlphaStar — programs that since 2013 have defined how game environments are transformed into laboratories for machine learning models, contributing to broader research on intelligence.
EVE Online stands out among previous DeepMind research environments in several ways. It operates as a single shard — a unified space universe inhabited simultaneously by hundreds of thousands of players. The economy is entirely player-driven: mining, trading, manufacturing, military conflict — all without top-down intervention. The game has been running continuously for over 20 years, generating behavioral, strategic, and economic data at a scale unachievable in synthetic environments.
DeepMind will not enter the live game. The partnership involves working on a local server with an isolated offline version — without affecting the production environment or players. Models will be tested under controlled conditions and evaluated for long-horizon planning, memory, and continual learning.
Historical Context: Games as AI Incubators
Google DeepMind has long used games as training and evaluation environments. In 2013, Atari DQN showed a reinforcement learning agent could learn dozens of games from raw pixels. In 2016, AlphaGo defeated the world's best Go player — a game considered beyond the reach of machines. In 2019, AlphaStar reached grandmaster level in StarCraft II, learning long-horizon planning in a dynamic environment.
SIMA (Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent), unveiled in 2024, went further: an agent trained to follow voice instructions across multiple 3D games simultaneously, without access to source code. EVE Online extends this research line with something previous environments did not offer: an emergent player community, a market economy based on supply and demand, and political and military conflicts unfolding in real time over decades.
Among games studied by DeepMind to date, EVE Online is the first maintained as a live service with an active paying player base — creating unique pressure for research neutrality.
Fenris Creations' Financial Position and Plans
Fenris Creations closed 2025 with revenues exceeding $70 million, with November 2025 becoming the game's record-breaking revenue month. Q4 2025 was the second-highest revenue quarter in EVE Online's more than 20-year history.
The studio is simultaneously developing two new titles: EVE Vanguard (an extraction-adventure FPS set in the EVE universe) and EVE Frontier (a space survival game). Neither has launched yet.
CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson emphasized that the new ownership structure is designed to enable decades-long thinking: "EVE is built to endure — and it only works if you're willing to keep pushing into the future."
Why This Matters
Google DeepMind's decision to invest in Fenris Creations and select EVE Online as a research environment signals the maturation of games as scientific infrastructure — not as a marketing tool or capability demonstration. Previous collaborations at this scale (AlphaStar with Blizzard, SIMA with multiple studios) were built from scratch or required limited access to production engines. Here, DeepMind enters an ownership structure — a different level of commitment.
EVE Online as a laboratory has concrete research advantages: player decisions are long-term, often irreversible, and based on incomplete information. An agent that performs in this environment must handle dynamic planning, game theory, and risk management under uncertainty — closer to real industrial, economic, and logistical problems than classical synthetic environments.
For the games industry, this is also a signal: a live-service game with decades of history and an active player base can be a valuable scientific asset, not just an entertainment product.
What's Next?
- DeepMind will conduct research experiments on a local, offline version of EVE Online — no timeline for first results has been announced
- Fenris Creations plans to expand the EVE universe with two new titles: EVE Vanguard and EVE Frontier — no release dates confirmed
- The new board of directors, chaired by Birgir Már Ragnarsson, takes its first full governance term — strategic changes possible within 12–18 months
Sources
- Fenris Creations (official blog) — Studio Behind EVE Online Goes Independent, Rebrands as Fenris Creations, Enters Research Partnership with Google DeepMind
- The Verge — Google DeepMind is investing in the studio that makes EVE Online
- Bloomberg (via The Verge) — investment value described as "in the millions of dollars" by Fenris Creations CEO