CCP's CEO compares Eve Frontier’s blockchain future to nuclear energy

Eve Frontier is a brand new approach to MMOs that uses blockchain, looking to use the technology for good

Eve Frontier / CCP Games

Eve Frontier is a project that’s hard to summarize in a simple sentence. The original Eve Online was built in 2003 on technology that wasn’t even top-of-the-line at the time, and while it’s evolved a lot over the years, there’s always the question with a massive game like this: “What if we could start over from scratch?”

In a way, that’s what Eve Frontier is. It’s looking at what could be possible if the game was built using the best technology 2024 has to offer and seeing how that could be used to achieve CCP Games’ ultimate goal of “Eve forever”. I’ve had a few forays into the world of Eve now. Once at Fanfest last year and now a visit to CCP’s London office. Both times I chatted with the game’s creators and got the feeling that the mantra of “Eve forever” is something very powerful and meaningful to them.

At the center of Eve Frontier's galaxy is three black holes / CCP Games

To achieve that, Eve Frontier is being built on the blockchain. Now, yes, I know. If you’re anything like me, hearing that word immediately makes your eyes roll and forces you into a skeptical mindset, but as I learned more about Frontier I started to see that this isn’t just going to be Eve but with NFTs. CCP is taking a different approach.

The studio’s goal is to, years down the line, eventually hand ownership of Eve Frontier entirely over to the players, and the blockchain is the technology that makes that possible. While Eve Online’s servers need to be maintained and paid for to keep operating, if Frontier is built how it’s described, then eventually it will be able to exist forever without any input from CCP.

However, when ‘forever’ is a viable concept for a game, that changes how you view a development cycle.

Eve Frontier's map has been tested with as many as 2 million star systems / CCP Games

“How can we build a world where time is an ingredient?” CCP’s CEO Hilmar Pétursson says, explaining his thought process. “If the game is going to go on for decades or centuries, how can we leverage that as an ingredient into the process of building the game?”

When it comes to a space survival game, the main word that Pétursson keeps returning to is “impact”. When what you build in-game could theoretically last forever, it’s important that whatever you’re doing feels like it’s making a real impact on the world around you. It can’t just exist for the sake of existing, it has to have purpose and meaning, be it something practical like gathering resources, or personal, like a grand base you made as part of a group.

These are all great high-minded concepts, but the practicalities remain to be seen, and taking just a quick look at Eve’s community spaces on Reddit and Discord, there is a large chunk of the community that isn’t convinced, and the baggage of blockchain plays a large part in that. However, Pétursson uses an interesting metaphor to address that baggage.

Eve Frontier / CCP Games

“Any piece of technology that is sufficiently powerful can be misused. For example, take nuclear,” he says. “We were able to split the atom and what was the first thing we thought of? ‘Oh, let’s make a bomb’. Not a great idea" … "and then we stopped because it became unpopular. But if we persisted, we would now have a small-scale nuclear reactor running on salt that would do nothing to the environment.

“We would literally have the cure for global warming already today if we had not succumbed to being afraid of the technology. We shouldn’t be afraid of things just because at some point they were used for bad things. They can always be used for good things.”

Eve Frontier / CCP Games

It’s a bold idea and one that I’m not entirely convinced by. However, having seen first-hand the love and care that the CCP team put into its work, I think they might be the right people to handle the worrisome technology of blockchain better than any who’ve tried it before. It’s no guarantee though. To use Pétursson’s nuclear analogy, we don’t live in a perfect world where we can guarantee this stuff will be used only for good, we live in a world with J. Robert Oppenheimer and as a result, generations of Japanese trauma.

Still, Eve Frontier is an idea I find inherently interesting and I think that if CCP Games can pull it off how it describes, it will be something special and could set a trend for MMOs going forward. The game will be available in closed-alpha starting December 10 for any who have an Eve Founders Access subscription, and I will be watching it with great intrigue to see what the response is from players.