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Project Awakening is born from EVE Online’s fragility - so it’s turning to the blockchainCCP Games' CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson doesn’t want to be forgotten
CCP Games' CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson doesn’t want to be forgotten
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In 2015, Pétursson tells me, a developer at CCP floated “the idea of storing EVE spaceships on the Bitcoin blockchain”. Despite the name, the Bitcoin protocol, the digital ledger that stores all the coins’ addresses, can hold many kinds of data, including the owners and operators of all the spaceships in CCP’s sci-fi MMO. While Pétursson wasn’t too familiar with blockchain at the time, which he says is surprising because he’s “into disruptive technology”, the idea “was like a little germ in [his] brain”.
What blockchain offered was a way of untying EVE from CCP. The nature of the technology is that it’s a distributed system with no single central owner. “[Blockchains] live through the power of participants,” Pétursson says. “I think people can well understand that a decentralised system is more fault tolerant than a centralised one. DARPA designed the internet to be decentralised, to be fault tolerant in the case of nuclear war. And, [they were the] smartest people in the world with an endless budget”.
CCP didn’t immediately begin work on a blockchain game, and in the years that the team bided their time, the technology advanced. Many Bitcoin protocol competitors launched, including Ethereum, the digital ledger used to track ownership of NFTs – a development very similar to CCP’s idea to track spaceship ownership on Bitcoin. In 2017, Pétursson watched as two blockchain games launched, CryptoKitties and Axie Infinity, showing the protocol could be integrated into the core of a game, not just used as a kind of offsite storage for a game that was already running.
Image credit:CCP
“It became obvious we should go figure this out,” Pétursson says. He found people within CCP who wanted to work on a blockchain project, and then he went looking for investment,finding $40m at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “We’re not taking funds from EVE players to subsidise this effort; we’ve ring-fenced it.”
While the germinating idea back in 2015 was to transfer EVE data to the Bitcoin protocol, looking at what other developers were doing, Pétursson’s plans grew larger. “It’s a whole new game, separate from EVE,” he says. However, per the funding announcement, this new blockchain-powered product, Project Awakening, will be set in the same universe.
CCP is no stranger to player creativity. A whole cottage industry surrounds EVE Online, with players using the developer’s API to create websites that do things liketracking the values of commodities on the in-game marketplace,recording all of the kills in its galaxy of New Eden, and letting players createrecruitment pages for their guild-like corporation. Outside of tools, there are dedicated blogs, streamers, and podcasters dissecting all the events and backstabbing taking place online. “We have a partner programme where people can get a licence to do for-profit activity,” Pétursson says. “And this is all a patchwork we’ve added to as the years have gone on.”
“No,” Pétursson says. “You can usually use old technology to do most things,” Pétursson continues. “People didn’t need the jet engine to make aeroplanes. You could still have propellers, and it would work fine. But aeroplanes with a jet engine are more powerful. People always say this, like ‘Do we need cars? Horses are fine’. Yes, I can do whatever with databases. And I can do it in Assembly. Why do we need C++ or Python? Why do we need AI? Why do we need all these things? I can cobble together a Frankenstein’s monster of various technologies. Sure, I’ve done it a bit. I’ve been doing software for 30 years. I want to do something cooler than that, and we’re going to use this dangerous piece of madness that everyone hates, and I’m going to show the world you can do amazing things with it.”
Pétursson’s right when he says people hate blockchain. The past five years have seen a flood of cryptocurrency marketing, bubbles, scams, and very few success stories that match the vision originally pitched, not to mentionthe environmental costs. Cryptokitties, the blockchain game launched in 2017, may have had thousands of trades a day at its peak, but it now often seesfewer than 100. Meanwhile, Axie Infinity relies on cheap labour from countries like the Philippines, and its currencylost 99% of its valueduring the 2022 cryptocurrency crash. A month later, North Korean hackers stole $615 million from the trading network that let players transfer money into and out of the game. A recentreport on DappGamblfound that 95% of NFTs are now completely worthless. There’s not much love or trust for blockchain, and many posts on the EVE Reddit attack CCP and Pétursson for engaging with the technology.
This is partly why Pétursson is keen to stress that Project Awakening and its funding are separate from EVE. He’s also said,both onlineand during EVE Online’s 20th anniversary Fanfest keynote, that NFT stands for ‘Not for Tranquility’ – the name of the MMO’s main server.
However, blockchain’s track record has not swayed Pétursson: “People do stupid things with everything. Like in the 1700s in Holland, people made [speculative] bubbles with tulips. Are tulips bad? The tulips are not to blame. People are to blame. People do stupid shit with new things all the time. It’s just what we do. Look at any industry; there are people doing bad things, people doing nefarious things, people doing stupid things, and people doing very cool and wholesome things. I just don’t care how bad people have used [blockchain] in the past. If people hate me for something they’re assuming I’m going to do that I’m not doing. Not my problem; it’s their problem.”
While I still don’t have a clear idea of what Project Awakening is – what genre it is; what players, not co-creators will do in it; how it fits into the EVE Online universe – I can see the shape of it, and I can see why Pétursson is intent on making it. And, he is,as he will admit, a stubborn man. After all, CCP has been steadfastly trying to make a successful shooter for fifteen years. Talking about his blockchain vision, he says “If it takes a few decades to get this right… I mean, the sooner you start, the sooner you’re done.”
It’s more than stubbornness, though, as you can see through so much of what CCP has done since it was founded in 1997: it’s a need to persist. “This is the germ that drives,” Pétursson says. “Whether it’s blood on calfskin or a blockchain – these things must not be forgotten.”
