EVE Online is one of the longest-standing MMOs of all time, celebrating its 22nd anniversary since its launch in 2003. In this episode, host Alexandra Takei, Director at Ruckus Games, sits down with CCP Games’ CEO Hilmar Petursson to unpack how the Icelandic studio still maintains one of gaming’s most complex live worlds, a single universe that has generated over $1B in lifetime revenue and 25 million players.
Hilmar walks through CCP’s four eras: the pre-Steam founding years, the Steam transition, Pearl Abyss’s acquisition, and the studio today, revealing how an original team of thirty developers pioneered player-driven economies, massive social coordination, and a forever game. The conversation then turns to EVE Frontier, CCP’s new blockchain-powered spin-off built on the Sui network. Hilmar explains why he believes blockchain is the next natural step in EVE’s evolution, not as a trend, but as a means to true player ownership and another step in the direction of a forever game: persistence that is independent of the company, its servers, and its original creators.
The episode closes on the state of the industry today from Hilmar’s perspective – why attention and discovery are gaming’s hardest problems and how developers can learn from EVE’s social design to build long-lasting worlds.
We’d also like to thank Lysto for making this episode possible! Lysto is revolutionizing how game development teams collect and act on real player feedback with its AI-powered playtesting insights. Learn more about how you can get bias-free feedback at https://lysto.gg/?utm_source=naavik&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=ad
This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.
Alexandra: What's up, everyone, and welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Alex, and this is the Interview and Insights segment.
I asked myself while preparing for today's conversation, how many games last a decade? Two decades? And to name a few, I thought of RuneScape, World of Warcraft. Tibia. League is getting close to 20. It's not been 20 yet, I think it's at like 15, 16. And Eve Online. And then I thought, what qualities do these games all share such that they've survived over 20 years? And what does it take to build a game that outlasts its creators? And to me personally, it's a few things. Player driven stories, highly social environments, and low key, while just continuing to actually update the game. But today, we're gonna hear from an expert on building games that outlast creators and beyond the games design, what technical choices might need to be made to do so.
We are in fact going to talk about the longest living of the titles that I've mentioned, Eve Online, and its subsequent chapter currently in development. Eve Frontier launched in 2023. Eve was the first major MMO to build its game logic on a relational database, allowing complex economic simulations that it's famous for.
By 2025, CCP had cited over 25 million lifetime players and more than a billion in lifetime revenue. And today, another chapter, as I mentioned, of Eve is in development. Eve Frontier, a blockchain powered spinoff built on the SWE network by Miston Labs. Sws object centric architecture allows tens of thousands of star systems and player-built structures to exist on chain, which is very naturally synonymous with the original games design I did use to run the crypto segment here at Naavik, so beyond discussing the Eve franchise, I look forward to rehashing why the blockchain is the absolute next natural step. With that, I'd like to introduce my guest, Hilmar Petursson, CEO of CCP. Beyond being the board member on several Icelandic game industry and technological development funds and councils, Hilmar might be the easiest bio I've ever had to write because you've been the CEO of CCP for 26 years, and I think that sets a record for the tenure of guests that I've ever had on the show.
So welcome. Please feel warmly welcome to the show and it's good to have you on.
Hilmar: Oh. What an intro. Thank you. Very happy to be here.
Alexandra: Yeah. Excited to have you on and it's amazing. I was like, wow. This is a very simple introduction. There's just 26 years of CCP, which is gonna make for an amazing conversation.
So, folks in the audience plotting course today, we're gonna hit the chapters and history of CCP. Why blockchain is the next evolution in the e franchise? What happens to the e franchise as a macro whole and, Hilmar, given your long tenure in the gaming industry and your legacy, we're gonna close with some of, some questions on your perspectives on the state of the current gaming industry today.
But first, history and chapters of CCP. I wanna start with a brief history and the way that I broke this up was BS — before Steam, per abyss, or sorry, before steam, then steam, then per abyss, and then the business today. And I'm gonna ask you a few questions around each chapter.
Hilmar: Oh, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, so, I would maybe start on Chapter zero, uh, which is on Chapter zero. Yeah. So, so my first job in games slash making three T on the internet was actually with a Stan company called Interactive. So I joined that company in August ‘96, straight out of university, right. Have been finished university. And that company was making the Metaverse, one for one as we saw it in the latest sort of revival of the Metaverse and very much inspired by Snow Cross and Neil Stevenson, et cetera. We were using VRML, virtual reality modeling language, to create like a UGC platform,, back in ‘96. This is almost pre, pre-internet bubble. And, and that was a very good preparation for what then became CCP, is that we very specifically kind of figured out that nobody really needed the metaverse, certainly not back then. Maybe in some future they will. I think we could probably time us a 50 years too early on the metaverse.
So, a few of us kind of step out of that company to create like an, an official spin up that is CCB to do just something simple like, making a single chart multiplayer space MMO with the biggest kind of number of players participated in the same simulation that, that was like a simplification on the metaverse idea to us.
And it's very interesting to see how over time, Ivan Land kind of exceeded all our wildest dreams about psycho, what the metaverse would be, so the best way to create the metaverse was specifically not to make it and quote unquote just make a game. So, so with that out there, I think, what kind of inspired team online was a, our sort of work on making the metaverse and figuring out without gameplay and basic stuff like inventory and progression, et cetera, nobody really has any reason to be in the metaverse.
And then, a lot of us were playing Ulti online, which for me was actually, I wouldn't say it was a step down, but there was an interesting experience because mostly I've been playing Muds before, which was kind of text-based on mainframe computers. Kind of a, a simulation of a world, And very much has informed everything we have done from Merz to Metaverse to kind of Ulti online, Copel with a lot of space, franchises, obviously elite, the huge inspiration cipher movies like PLA and Alien Aliens, et cetera.
So, out of this kind of big mixture of, all the things, we, we sort of come together and, and the first act of the company is to make a family board game in Iceland to seed fund the company. And actually that board came, sold 10,000 copies. Which is basically one in every eight homes in Iceland, both a copy of the, of the of the board game.
So, in terms of like hitting our core market segment, we have some work to do when it comes to our games on a, on a global scale. But we've set the, the by part high for market penetration with our board game that became seed capital. We're gonna make a prototype of Eve one nine, where we then raised money in Iceland, actually in April, 2000, which for people that pay attention to things is one month after the official burst of the internet bubble.
But the news just didn't really travel as much back in those days. So, the internet bubble was still very much alive, throughout the early 2000s. So, with that in hand, like all the inspiration, somewhat kind of understanding of how to build our sailboats. We then spent three years of like the, the craziest crus I've ever were participated in, but almost heard about, and then somehow with what is best described as a miracle ragtag bunch of people in Iceland, 30 in total, which had never made a game. We just made Metaverses before and we had not even seen a game developer from afar when we, we should be online. And to its benefit and to its kind of work in progress, is the fact we, we've been, we've been, say, patching it up to reach this kind of full form for the past 20 years based on those kind of initial conditions.
Alexandra: Wow. Yeah. And I appreciate the, well, this was definitely in the before, before STEAM chapter, because you're talking in 2000s, a team of 30, you know, you eventually built a board game, this ambition to build the metaverse in like 1996 or whatever date you said. And so, you launch Eve 2003, like you said, with this, this miracle, right, to, I think you said 30 people? And like you, like I mentioned in the introduction, it was the first MMO to be built on a relational database versus writing to a disc. And I guess, how did you think about this systems design approach that influenced everything from the skill system to the economy, given that you guys maybe hadn't, like you said that this was the first game this team had shipped before, perhaps you had no preconceived notions of the way it was supposed to go, but was there any specific thought to that systems design question that was very different from other video games perhaps at the time?
Hilmar: Yeah, so we decided early on we were not gonna have charts or servers. They'll call it kind of charts in an MMO sense. So back then when you were joining a particular server for Ulti Online, there's even a big backstory in Ulti Online. Yeah, definitely. About like the research chart crossing the diamond and it's short of the diamond is as a copy of the world, kind of very elaborate technical backstory to excuse the Tator service.
So, we wanted to have everyone play the same game so everyone on planet Earth will be able to interact with each other if they meet in space. And every story told in this world will be a common story for everyone playing that game. And that had a lot of architecture and game design implications. So, one, I mean we, we specifically picked a space game because we have to build a lot of space, for lack of a better word, to have like hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people see our game world and spaces.
Well, easier to make than trees and grass and caves and all those things. And, and we made like 7,000 solar systems, which were kind of procedurally generated. So, you need big, you need a big space, then you need to have a pretty good idea of how you're gonna store all the data for all the players at that scale.
And because we had more background in metaverse and, and enterprise software development, it was a fairly intuitive pick for us to just use a database. We did not realize at the time it was a mildly controversial choice. I had to debate other MMO developers at like Austin GBC 2005. I remember being on a panel and being quite perplexed that this was controversial.
And, but it was kind of intuitive. Millions of people putting their energy into a ship, shared, persistent world you would use something that is industry standard for persistence, which were databases at the time. Then, when everyone is playing the same game, the game becomes a massive social coordination construct.
So, it is different when you're playing on a maybe small yard with maybe a few thousand people versus you're playing on a, on a, on a universe with hundreds of thousands of people. So, we have to come up with bigger problems for the coordination making sense. So, this is in part why Eve Online has been so long living.
And there's also factors into the choice of space. Like the game is literally on a galactic scale, and the things you can do in the game are of a galactic scale. So, so when you have like titans to build, which are bigger than series on planet Earth, and you need like, uh, thousands of people to achieve it, I think the first kit was built by 4,000 people over four months.
You can just imagine the coordination of getting that to happen, like all the logistics of it. Why are people doing it in the first place? So, it goes into a lot of this kind of flexible social organization at scale that Harari wrote extremely well about in Sapiens. When I read that book, then it was like, okay, wow.
Now finally I have, I have words. For what was just intuition about like the it, their subjective reality concept he talks about in that book is very much exercised in Eon line. You could argue Eon line. Is it the subjective reality to be to a point where sometimes call it a, an it, their objective reality because the, the persistency layer takes it from a fantasy to be a concretely kind of visceral thing or, or like a real thing.
So, so these were some of the sort of architecture decisions that flowed from the fact you wanted everyone to play the same game. And, and that is still not really something that people kind of dare even try even today.
Alexandra: Yeah. That's really interesting. And I think also that's another thing that I pulled out from that is.
You know, I mentioned the, just updating the game as part of a way to help the game live beyond its initial stasis. But, you know, for you, you kind of mentioned this like element of like power creep I've watched, you know, in every anime, every season, something needs to escalate bigger, bigger boss, SSS plus hero.
So, I think that's something similar and you created like from the very beginning, setting it in space, having it be big, right? And colossal created for those moments where you could basically kind of power creep the game up or make bigger moments that you are more impactful to the community at a grander scale.
And so I'm curious because now that, you know, we're in 2003, you've launched this game, it was a little bit perplexing as to how you decided to host it and how, and how people engage with it. But you did eventually go launch on Steam, you know, when Steam came out in 2008., I think you, that's around the, that's around the right time.
And I'm curious what made you decide to launch the game as a box game, and then I think later on you switch to free to play. Walk me through like your kind of psychology more maybe from, more from the business perspective at that time about what, what was going on for CCP and why you guys made that decision.
Hilmar: Yeah. So when we are, laying down kind of the plan for the game in literally the year 2000, then it was not a realistic option to put something that was kind of CT rom sized in terms of megabytes, something that is 600 megabytes as a download only option. It just wasn't really feasible on a, on a worldwide scale.
So, box distribution was still very much a thing. If you look at like Ultima EverQuest, World of Warcraft, you online, they all came in a box initially. So, this element of like, you would buy the box, the box would have a CT key. The CT key was one month of your subscription was how you took m os to market. So, we kind of just followed that kind of basic play pattern in 2000 century.
And we had made a deal with, with Simon and Schuster, which actually had a, uh, division for interactive software and computer games. So we had made an arrangement with them to be our publisher and distributor. They actually designed to stop doing games and focus on books, which were, I mean, obviously are a big deal, but Amazon was coming online and many sort of new vectors for them to deal with.
So, they closed down their gaming division while we are publishing the game. So, in the middle of that moment basically sort leading up, I think it was few months before our release, they basically close everything down. So, we have this weird situation where, we actually don't have the publishing rights to the game.
And the game is only available in a box that are already distributed into channel. So, it was 30,000 copies of Eve Online that were lost to the retail channels of the world. So, when the game comes out, there is almost like a sort of world war by scavenger hunt of all the people that have been playing in our data tests, which were just downloaded in finding an Xbox with the CD key and scratching it off and sharing it between each other because, ah, I found one in Holland. Hey, I found one in Wisconsin. And then Eve players were just kind of trolling and scavenging. And they found almost all the boxes in the, in the distribution system. But then we had like a six months period where we couldn't really offer the game for download until we had come to an arrangement for Simon and Sue asteroids.
They very thankfully gave, was the permission to, to offer the game as a digital download. So, we in a way became sort of end of 2003, the first game again, to be only digital download and no post distribution. And that was quite unheard of. Then we did little hacks like we offered a three day trial without giving your credit card information ahead of time.
All sorts of these kind of things, which we experimented with on the go to market front.
Alexandra: Hmm, interesting.
Hilmar: Then we actually did get an email from the Young Ox start of team. Or of Valve with Steam in 2006, we still have that email reached out from, uh, somebody at Valve on, introducing Steam to us. Of course, I used Steam Playing Half Live and all that.
And I think we did become the first most player team came not made by Valve on Steam. I think initially we focused on just single player games. I think we were one of the first multiplayer games to join Steam. And I think you're probably right on 2008. I think we got the email in 2006 and uh, it probably took us a couple of years to work it out because it was a bit orthodox with a subscription model work on Steam.
And I had many fun meetings over at 12 about that, where we, again, to a pretty good solution, which I think is still a solution we have for, for every kind of.
Alexandra: Got it. And so you mentioned like a couple partners, right? And that I think brings me to kind of this third chapter, right? So, Steam is a partner, sorry, Simon and Schuster, the publisher, who's now in books.
And then in 2018, I believe Pearl Abyss, you do an acquisition for about 425 million. What were you guys thinking at the time and actually looking back, given today, how would you think about this deal right now in 2025?
Hilmar: So, obviously by 2018 when we joined over par base, CCP has been in operation for over 20 years.
And, and to get the game initially funded, I mean, it wasn't just a seed capital from the port game. We had raised money in 2000 from mainly Iceland investors. We had more sort of, um, international investors join us. In 2005, uh, which was mostly kind of secondary share sales from the initial Isla investor cohort to investors.
I mean, one of them was a company called Kenner Catalyst, which actually done quite well from themselves since then. But they were, they were a bit of the first East Coast VC kind of vibe back then. And, so we had kind of done secretary kind of right, not capitalized the company, but kind of re-engineered the capital ones.
And of course, there is the natural thing of like some point you provide an exit. So, we joined off with Polar Base Za process, which we run with the investment back then. Talked to like a lot of different options on that front. And polar base definitely came up on top. And it was very much driven by the fact that I mean if we're not an IPO company at some point, investment license and all that are getting to a place where it makes sense.
So, that was kind of the thinking of doing that. I mean, per an extremely inspiring company, they had of course made an MMO called Black Desert, but in many ways has way more similarities with Eve online than, than people think. On the surface of it, obviously Black Desert is an extremely cool sort of action, RPG, kind of like fantasy game and Eve online is a space game, but, if you have ever tried to make beer in Black Desert, you understand how I make the unlucky of like the level of complexity, the level of hardness of both, there was a lot of alignment. So, we've, had a great time with PAL based on just more sharing the tricks and trades of how you make an MMO in Korea, how you make an MMO in Iceland for places.
So, that has been a, a very productive relationship on kind of, it feels smart, like more sort of two game makers honing their craft, by kind of sharing knowledge and perspective from our very different corners of the world. Still kind of bonding together in this passion for, for, online games and games overall, obviously they're upcoming games, Crim Desert. I don't know, a two to four of Open World Fantasy Games, unlike almost like a current oral level scale, is actually a single play game. It's which is also very interesting in the state of the game or state of games overall, which we can cover later.
Alexandra: Yeah. Okay. Okay. And sort of brings us to, that's 2018 to sort of today, right? And before I move on to Eve Frontier, wanna ask a couple questions about like, snapshot of Eve Online today, sort of, you know, do you, what's the average age of an Eve player today? What is the, where does, what does revenue streams look like for you today?
And I'd also be curious because you guys have been building kind of this relational database model where you're tracking so many pieces of the economy. I'd be curious if you could name like the top like five KPIs that you guys track, And I bet they different from standard live ops games, so those, I think are the questions. Average age of an Eve Online player, what does the business look like today and top five KPIs that you guys track?
Hilmar: Yeah, so it's very interesting. When we share Eve Online, the average age of CCP employees was 27. And the average age of Eve Online players was 27. And that new cell cohort, we joins us in the year 2003 with us scavenger hunt for the boxes and all those kind of fun things, has in many ways very much stayed with us ever since. So, the core audience has almost a, with the game. So, over time the, the average age of, of the overall league player base is kind of anchored with the initial cohort that then kind of in way retains forever.
So of course we then add new people. We are, it's a bit counterintuitive to other MMO makers that compare notes with that. We do have about half a million people that play Eve for the first time every single year. So we actually do not have as big of a challenge in people joining the game.
We do have an ongoing struggle on how to onboard people into Eve that has, uh, there are many famous memes on the internet with the learning curve of mnet. And as the game has grown in content and complexity and kind of letting deadness, that learning curve is not getting any easier, we have become smarter over time.
And we have had to learn a lot on that front on how, how to onboard people more effectively. So, I think actually today is the best time to join you online. It, we've introduced various peoples to connect new players and veteran players together in a productive way, which I think is becoming the, the best way.
So, if I were to now take the median aids, it actually isn't quite my median aids. I'm now 52 and it's a bit lower. I think, I recall a number like 38 years old would be the btn aids. It's actually not something we track very much. We're not so much obsessing about that. What I find very inspiring that often we have quite young people make it to the upper echelons of Heim.
Actually, we have a Democratic elected council called the Council of Stellar Management that comes to Iceland every year at the start of the year and spends a week. At CCP headquarters debating with our camp designers. I was with myself about like the comings and going and, and I, I, make an effort to always join up and, and be kind of with them in that experience.
And there were two people on the CSM in their early twenties this year. So, to make it in your early twenties to the, I don't know, highest, alone of Eve Online be elected by the player base onto the console of STAR Management. It's only has, I think nine seats, is quite the achievement. And in both cases, those, those people had started playing him online.
One was 12-year-old and the other one was something like 16, I think. So, I found that inspiring that, that people are still joining him online in their kind of mid-teens and joining to the top of the game. So, that kind of fights against the, the, the median aids just growing out as, as the decades pal.
Alexandra: Sure. And yeah, and we'll talk about this a little bit more in the Eve franchise, and I would, I have some parallels with, back in, I was at Blizzard when we launched classic and some analogs about like how you're thinking about players as relation to the game living forever. But we'll get there in a second. But the other question was about what are like the five KPIs that you guys track? And then we'll move on to talking about Eve Frontier.
Hilmar: So, I mean, to your point earlier, we used to track a lot transactions per second, uh, because we were, we were using Microsoft SQL Server and we were, were by far the highest TPS application on SQL Server when we come out.
SQL Server was kind of just having it early stacks into the world of, of basically competing with Oracle. And, and because we couldn't afford Oracle, we picked Microsoft SQL Server. And we were damn, we were banging that rapidly with, with transactions per second. We were in getting like bleeding edge builds from the s QL server team to puts up some issues we had with bugs and bottlenecks in the, in the game.
Because we're really testing it. So I mean, for scale it's, I mean obviously isn't a lot today, but we're doing about 10,000 transactions per second. But, I mean, it's still a respectable number today, but it was, it was borderline science fiction back in the, when we released the game. And I, we actually didn't really find a good way to address it until I found a company in the US called Texas Memory System, located in Houston, and they had invested something called the Raman.
So it basically was like a solid disc drive producing not like solid stem memory, but just normal random access memory as you make in computers. It operated with battery, sort of reserve power. And they were using this in the oil industry in Texas, and we needed to get some like special military equipment export license to cast the ramson out of the US tend to our long-term data center.
And once we have the ramson, our sort of TPS problem kind of went the away. So we have been kind of, kind of final on that front since then, but that did take a while to, to figure it out. Then there's another kind of technical parameters, which we, what's, how, how bad it becomes because what also happened over time with the coordination at scale, sort of at Eve backs four, is that Eve players started to one off themselves in how many people they could pile into one massive fleet fight as it's called in.
So two sides are fighting over something. Sometimes it was a little bit un unclear other than just the break with the record. But now we have made various, with three criteria, et cetera, that become the point of it. And we have set the Guinness World Record for the bar largest game fight. Quite often I think it's now sits just over 8,000 people kind of in an all out brawl inside kind of a pretty epic spaceship soup.
I would encourage anyone to check out the video clips, of it. It's something to behold. And, and this both became a major problem for our servers, but also for the experience. 8,000 people, 4,000 don't each site calling shots and things like that. It's very hard to make happen in runtime. So we came up with this concept of time dilation inspired of, of course by canalization in physics in our own reality.
So, when these kind of large speed fight happens, the time dilates, so it becomes like bullet time, which both helps the sequencing of the state transitions, but also gives people a bit of a different pace to call the shots and. So, I mean we, we've kind of had unlocks over the period of time in kind of raising the ceiling on how big these can become, but it is always a, a bit of a nil piping moment when, when people are close to setting a new cracker on just how will the servers uphold.
There's been a mixture of hardware and software innovation to make this possible, et cetera. But, then we also focus a lot on just like DAU with, for Eve is probably more like weekly active and daily active. Obviously day one retention, day seven retention, day 30 retention focus a lot on that. I mean, of course, we, like any company, look at ARPU, LTV, those kind of things. We very much focus on people being flying their spaceships in space. Often the game can be played sort of, you can be in a station which is kind of a safe haven and you're kind of chatting with your friends, or spinning your spaceship. It's an oddly comforting and endearing thing to do spaceship spinning.
But we want you to be in space because the, the game is ultimately a game of kind of players versus players kind of space survival. So how many, how many people are flying in space is another KPO we, we focus on.
Alexandra: Hmm, very cool. Yeah, so some standard ones and some certainly some very special ones.
I love the transactions per section, per per second. And, yeah, I think it's important to kind of like understand from the, you know, there's obviously business KPIs, but then there's also gameplay insights and sort of like what are people doing and how that could inform, business insights. So, I think that's very, very cool. Alright. That brings us to that.
Hilmar: In our headquarters in Iceland, we have like a pretty cool solar system map that shows every death in real, real time into our canteen. So when we're having food, we are watching Murder in Mayhem. That's amazing. In real time happening in, in the new 10 solar system pressure.
Alexandra: That's awesome. Okay, so that kind of fully wraps us up to current day. And I we're gonna talk a little bit about the relationship between Eve Online and Eve Frontier in the second section. Sorry, in the section after this one, but I wanna sort of talk a little bit about Eve Frontier. And just a reminder for the audience, Eve Frontier is basically a version of Eve that's gonna be built on the blockchain and Hilmar, like, I wanted to ask you sort of when you started thinking about the blockchain just in general? You'd already successfully built a game on the data, on the database, the SQL server as you mentioned. And why were you even thinking about building a game on the blockchain and like where in time, or sorry, when in time did you start thinking about it?
Hilmar: So, the first time I started thinking about it for reals, is that, well, I mean it maybe starts a little bit earlier, so I think it is about 2009. I, I have the receipt in terms of an image.
I start to make this local for Eve, which has the infinity symbol in it. And, and I start to think about like, okay, 2009, the camp's been running for like six years, which felt like forever to me. In my kind of shipping it 27 and like your horizon is maybe five years. I, I recall our, while this ideas for even line was it was gonna go on for five years, the, the, that was our, about this like Excel model was like, we're gonna peak at 150,000 scrappers and then we're gonna tap out for five years.
And that, that was the extent of our imagination. I mean, really honest. I mean, we had some awake ideas that maybe that was just to put it in a box that fit into Excel, but it was just unprecedented That came again, would go on for decades. It, it was just, I mean, sure, like some single credit games. It exist.
I mean, people are even playing the original elite today. I, I could probably find one DAU just today, somewhere in that. But this idea, like our virtual awards was going on for decades was just broke the imagination. But there in 2009, I was like, this could just go on forever. We make this local, we start to talk about email online forever as the, for the game, et cetera.
But then in 2015, somebody explains to me how he could store other things than the value of Bitcoin on the Bitcoin block chain. So, the Bitcoin protocol actually is quite flexible. The Lightning Network is implemented on Trump, or the fact you can interpret on SPECT outputs for many different things.
And there were even games, using that as persistency layer as, as four games. And, uh, and somebody was explaining this to me and I was like, this is interesting. Maybe this, this idea might play a part in the foreverness. Maybe like Bitcoin blockchain could be like cold storage for even land spaceship.
And I was thinking some like wormhole mechanics of like, you could send your space ship to cold storage by opening up a worm hole and then you could take it out of like, I was having just sort of fantasies about this in the context of forever. Like, I mean forever. Like if you truly wanna go forever, then like, the weirdest things become issues.
Like the fact we have a database somewhere in the Docklands area. And if that goes away sooner, we have backups and all that. But I mean, the company might be a risk factor because companies don't last forever when not everyone is like, Nintendo has been making some kind of gains for over 200 years. So, so this kind of stack of like foreverness and very much obviously Bitcoin was kind of touted us through decentralization and full to tolerance.
It's unstoppable, which I think, I mean to a large sex extent has still held up true. And I mean, they come up with a good kind of quantum safe, accurate it at some point. It's hard to really see how it it's ever gonna stop. So that's where kind of first okay, then I take a look at it and it was like, ah, okay, well it's, it's very esoteric.
This might not be a thing to be actually doing. But that was a bit of a seed that kind of, got stuck in my brain. Then, when Ethereum comes out with smart contracts, then it was just, okay. Interesting. Like Ethereum in a way, if, if a Bitcoin is like a database, Ethereum is kind of like a computer and it's kind of like at the time, like a very little raspberry pie level of, of like TPS that the whole world is sharing one raspberry pie.
But it's kind of an interesting concept, especially with the smart contracts. And um, what I came to appreciate is that smart contracts on Ethereum are a piece of software that lives in an economically adverse environment. Like, it's economic warfare between different applications on Ethereum implemented our smart contract and that layer has largely helped out.
You kind of close over a media and stuff like that, and that was like, okay. This could maybe become a moding platform where and at the time, and still today we have like an API gateway where thousands of people have been writing kind of companion software in the form of websites and all sorts of applications for online.
But, we're very hesitant to allow that to ride into the world state. So largely just reading back from the world state, it, we can allow it to ride into the world states because we're using a database, but it's, it, it is something you have to deeply think of ahead of time. And I was like, okay, maybe this foreverness and the decentralization idea need the smart contracts can become a marking platform.
And then obviously was like every MMO, I'm sure you experienced this when you were working on place, earth has real money trading happening whether we like. And of course, only if we fight it in our Uli it's not allowed. We chase people down that are doing it. It never really felt like a good solution to be fighting your core of customer base.
But just like the, the kind of mobility writing into the world state and, early money trading and the things, I mean, actual value, the, these are very challenging things to it into a 20-year-old game because people have expected a certain thing. It's technically complicated. It's legally complicated. So, so I at that point started to think about, okay, if we were to make another game, like now 20 years later, do we have enough of a foundation to warrant it existence?
So, if we combine this kind of decentralization. Smart contracts as moding. And real monitoring, just kind of using mainly the leak of framework around blockchains in the context of a game. It's actually less of a technical thing than a legal thing. Technical helps a bit on it drop, but it's mainly the legal of framing, like, uh, cryptocurrencies and blockchains are another chapter of the law than virtual items in a game.
And then I have like a long kind of list of like all the things. If I had the time scene, then my metaphorical arm of like, if I have the time scene, what, what do I go and different on kind of various mechanisms in the game. And 20 years into it, it did feel like, okay, maybe this warrants making what I think about like a new city.
I very much think of human online, like a city of then kind of thought about the metaphor of what is it really? I'm a CEO of a company that takes care of E one Mind. What am I really, am I president? Am I like, what am I? And a mayor of a city always felt very, very apt because what people tend to obsess about are all the little things about living anniversary of boats.
Like, just like you do in a city. I'm now in London sticking the subway this morning and it was late and there was canceled wine. And then like there was a crowd that was late for a meeting. Like, this is my experience of the city of London. It's great when the subways around time when it's not like, and I become angry at the, the mayor in some metaphor.
Of like, why can't you have the trains run on time? And this is very much the experience and the energy we feel from youth players. I see. They, they care mostly, I mean, they care about the big things, but mostly like vis, surely the, the actual, the
Alexandra: Things that impact their everyday life.
Hilmar: Is the quality of life, of playing the game and that not being frustrating and that may being addressed if it is frustrating. So anyway, it's a city that then I started to think about, okay, if line is wrong, then okay, a new city would be like New York. And I kinda like using that as, as an analog key because, I mean, New York feels like an Italian city a little bit to me, like and I think the, some of the fountain cohorts were Italians.
So, so thinking about it like that, okay, now we have new building materials. We are building skyscrapers and elevators and all that, but Roman still, still awesome with the Colosseum and like many hissing things, the best concrete that ever like, and an amazing place. And these cities coexist in our world and they're separate.
They're different. And the overall world is, is more rich because they both exist. So, while, I mean, as soon as we see a P land, people are coming to us. So, when it's E two coming out, and we very much resisted that idea, and it doesn't really feel like that to us. I mean, uh, we are also very inspired by Vow Classic.
As we were referencing, like vow Classic became like a, a way to tap into a certain type of feeling again. Yeah, absolutely. Our customer base and the nostalgia cohort were able to work at is very big due to the way elective rolled out with the boxes and the 30,000 copies and all that. The nostalgia cohort for OG one line is a little different, but the nostalgia of exploring a new world with new mechanics and all that does, when I play Frontier, it tickles my nostalgia in a, in a, in the way of like, I don't really know what's going on and even if I'm very much involved in making that game, I don't really know what's going on. It's all procedurally generated, like it's a hundred thousand solar systems. There are three black holes in the sector, racking, chaos all over the place.
Obviously all the mods and things that people are doing make the game even wilder, so, so it becomes a little bit like the original moment of discovering a new world for Eve played again, kind of 20 some years later.
Alexandra: Yeah. So, it sounds like, basically, and this was gonna be a question for later on, but you're not going to shut down Eve Online to Frontier?
Oh no, there's, it's, it's Rome and it's New York. And I think it's very similar to the Blizzard pattern, I think for when we launched classic. There was a very, there's a lot of questions about, are we gonna merge this back? Are we gonna just go to, or after classic, do we go to Mist? Like, are we gonna keep going in the same, living, the same history over and over again?
But it sounds like, so that these are gonna be mutual communities. And of course, you know, I have questions about cannibalization and migration between the two cities, perhaps that might impact cannibalization, but I still kind of wanna address, you know, you talked about, you investigated, Bitcoin, right?
You investigated Ethereum, and you've recently made the public announcement that you'll be building on swe. And a lot of the premise of this is to obviously build first a sophisticated open trading economy, right, to kind of, I guess, give the players what they were doing anyway, which was real money trading.
That's the first, that's one of the reasons. The second reason is to avoid, I guess, reliance on your own servers and something that could potentially live forever past the dissolution of the company. Or, you know, let's just say like a, like you said in our kickoff, a meteor hits Iceland, kind of, kind of setup.
But are you not concerned that even though the blockchain is less centralized, there are still centralized rules that like, you know, a protocol chooses to elect towards? That's there's a reason why you chose SWE over Ethereum. And how do you guys think about that? Do you think about that as like another dependency?
And do you think that you'll be able to build a business on a fully on chain game that you think is gonna be sustainable? Because, you know, you talked a lot about. What does this warrant the investment?
Hilmar: So, not only warrant the investment, does it warrant, does it have permission to exist?
Because like for Frontier to coexist with email online, like it is, it is living with a rather legendary alter sibling, so to speak. Right? Right. It, it's, it's quite a thing to, to hold a, a, a small count to even line. So, I mean, we have to think deeply about it. Why does it really warrant to exist?
And I think, I mean, there are several like technical and technocratic elements that, that I mentioned, but I think one of the things that immediately came to mind is this genre of survival games that it is similar to MMOs, but it's a very different feeling that, um. When you play a survival game. So, we by much wanted to kind of explore this feeling of survival.
Eve online is like a space opera, like it's a massive bustling world with trillions of people. It's very much kind of a, because you think the best sci-fi sort of analog key is the Hyperion Capto, which is an extremely good science fiction book written in the very late eighties, Bogles the Mind that somebody could, or transcend could write it in I think 89.
And it very much describes this kind of cultured ling world and evil line is that of course with a ct, dark underbelly and all the spectrum of, of kind of civilization, but it, but it is a very civilized world. Whereas in Frontier we are. We are living in a space apocalyptic, broken world. Like, uh, it's a world that takes place or it's a premise that take place around three black holes locked in a kind of a three body, the dark kind of macab, and that s around it.
So, uh, but people want to be there to mine. The ritz's you can get out of the rifts of space happen around those three black holes, but it is very much a colony that is always being ruined. So, when you play Frontier, you are, you are in a poster book apocalyptic, kind of Mad Max survival feeling. It is not the bustling metropolis you are.
Like, again, taking New York as an example, I, I think about like three Daniel de Lewis movies. You can be in the last Mohican, you can be in, there will be blood, or you can be in gangs of New York and you're somewhere between last Mohican and there will be blood. Think about like when he is, he's digging up the tar in the well and the bucket and being fall on him and he breaks his leg and he's like crawling out of the well with like blood and oil and it's like clipping back to town.
That's the feeling we're going for like, and then, I mean, eventually I, I predict it. We'll move more into cancer of New York. But we're very much taking it all the way there. You're in the beginning and it's very much about the harshness of space, the evilness of the atropy of space. It's very much, it's a, it's a world that is grinding you down.
It's hostile and it's evil and it's angry. This is like the, there's sort of brand logo or, or like the steam logo frontier. It's always kind of like, this is the feeling we're going on. The, the actual game logo is a little more sort of, sort of even line inspired. But this is what you put on the t-shirts and, and this is the contrast.
Like, it's a, it's an evil world that wants to kill you and everyone there wants to kill you. If the world wasn't crazy enough and all the machine life that lived there, then the other people certainly are going to kill you. So, it's a very angry and evil game. And, and you could say, what the fuck?
Like, uh, wasn't Eve Online hardcore enough? No.
Alexandra: Yeah, I was about to say hardcore enough, right?
Hilmar: That is our analysis Eve Online just wasn't hardcore enough. But again, our madness of forever if that like there is this element of the world needs to present the problem. The world is a problem statement that we want to have endured forever because in what you were challenging me on, I mean, aren't there several points of centralization and things and things that challenge that?
For sure. And probably the biggest challenge, especially when the world becomes autonomous, when all of us disappear and the world is autonomous, which will take decades by the way, but we need to imbue it with a problem statement kind of like our own world, which seems stupidly big. I mean, when you look at the clay space of our universe, it's like, it pokes the mind like, who designed this? This is a little too much.
Alexandra: Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Hilmar: Dude. Like, what, where were you going for? Like, there's no way we will solve the, the galaxies of galaxies and the universe of universe that we live in, and we're having quite there yet, but we've taken a, a good mark at it.
What is a game that will puzzle an audience for, for decades and, and centers to come?
Alexandra: Hmm. And the, and the blockchain, I guess, is a part of that hardness for you?
Hilmar: So, the blockchain is more about the modability. It's more about the legal framework for true player ownership. Decentralization plays a part into the foreverness.
I mean, this element that we, the creator can enshrine things onto the blockchain where it is mutable and we can. Can't change it after a pointed time. In the beginning we'll probably have like kind of keys to go and modify, but eventually we will throw the keys away and certain parts of the world state become immutable with, develop a framework we call digital physics, where over time we can solidify layers upon layers of the game, and that becomes immutable and people can still build new features on top of it.
Right? We're also gonna make it all open source. So again, in this disaster scenario, as we were talking about, if a meteor hits Iceland or one of its many volcanoes blows up, it's probably more probable, then all the, the things should be there for Eve to live on past it. Interesting. An extinction event like.
Alexandra: Yeah. And I think there's like, there's definitely something beautiful to that. I mean, when you, when you kind of, when you pin Eve Frontier as a mirror of our world, right? Like you can't change history. Like JFK was assassinated. It is immutable, right? Like this thing happened in the past, it was immutable. Whereas obviously in a lot of video games you're like, ah, we launched this character and it was doing way too much damage.
So now we'll go back and we'll change it and we will re-correct the future, right? As a better way for the world to as to make it a better environment. But I think that there's something hard, obviously hardcore about things becoming immutable in the game and we don't change the past and we just move on and we play in this world that we've created for ourselves.
And so, but I do have kind of a question, and before we talk a little bit about also the speed of development between the two games, and then we'll kind of go into our closing questions about the gaming industry, but. You just mentioned what the fuck, Eve is notorious for its steep learning curve and hardcore community.
This is even more hardcore perhaps. And your resolution was that Eve online wasn't hardcore enough and we need to make something even more hardcore. But I guess a question to you is that if you want the game to live forever, you probably need to build a new generation of fans. And we spoke early on in the beginning that people will find it challenging to onboard into Eve online.
Do you have this fear that perhaps the only people that will play Frontier are the people who played online and then you're actually diminishing the population of the people that are fans? And then how is the world gonna live forever if you don't have a robust number of CCU playing all the time and because of the game is so hard to get into, how do you guys think about that?
Hilmar: Yeah. So there are several ways to think about that. Like one is the ensemble I mentioned earlier. We have people in their early twenties on our Man Smith. So, people are definitely joining you online. On year 20, turning 23 now let's May. Mm-hmm. So, so I mean that is out there. Then I take inspiration from things which are extremely hard, but have been adopted into the mainstream over time.
One example is running a marathon. So, the first person that runs a marathon literally dies from it like running from marathon.
Alexandra: I was just talking about this the other day with my friends. Yeah. Felt how strange the marathon is celebrating.
Hilmar: Exactly. Was running Rome, which is up in this context of like running from marathon to Rome to make known that an invasion was coming and dies.
Then like today, it would not be an unreasonable thing for my mom to run a marathon. I mean, people in their seventies and eighties are finishing marathons and they never made the marathon shorter. There is something that happened in the world that through training, social organization, normalization, et cetera, it became an, a reasonable thing for a grandma to finish a marathon and left from, met from first person trying dying.
2000 years later, everyone is doing it. And then, okay, now marathons have been normalized completely, and there's a huge one here in London that is oversubscribed and you need like laies and whatever to, to get a ticket. So, millions of people all over the planet run marathons. They run multiple marathons per year.
So then, okay, marathons are obviously not hard enough. Then people came off with Ironman. So, the marathon is just a cherry on top of the swimming and the biking and okay, that wasn't the love. Now people do like, um, 500 miles running in the tat somewhere, where you're like, have to sleep while you're running in.
Like, we just have this tendency of taking something extremely hardcore to the point of dying in the first beta test, to the point of normalizing, and then making it harder and harder and harder. And I think people will be running marathons forever. So that's one. Then I'm very inspired by the game of chess having like a mega moment in the world today, like chess.com.
I don't know, that's like a hundred million MAU or something.
Alexandra: Yeah, it, it is. I've had the CEO actually of chess dot com on our show.
Hilmar: Amazing. Whatever those peeps are doing, I wanna, I'm gonna repeat some of that. Like in the, in the 4,000 years of chess and in the 4,000 years of email online, I for sure email online hope that email online can take from chess and have its biggest day in the sun, 4,000 years from now like chess has.
And again, I never make chess easier. Like, I mean, there have been like little tweaks like fish around them and things like that, but mostly right, the game is the same game, people have been playing for, for 4,000 years. Test.com did a really good job on kind of matchmaking and leaderboards and like all these kind of things and kind of making it accessible for people.
So, I think we see this. I have time and time again people take something hardcore and obscure. I mean this t-shirt is a little bit sort of Norwegian death metal inspired. I mean, that used to be an absolute needs obscure thing and maybe. Norwegian, that metal version of metal is still a bit out there.
But I mean, my God, like, I mean, metal has been taking mainstream to no end. I mean, Metallica was the biggest touring band in the world for tomato time. And, fashion trends are, were and still are kind of heavy metal even today. So, we are just not afraid of this concept of, even if it looks like super weird and hardcore today, it might not be that when it diffuses into mainstream like marathon, Jazz, and Ian Dust metals.
Alexandra: Interesting. Okay. So, I think that's where it is. You have this belief, your assumption case is that people gravitate towards that over time rather than like perceiving the world as static 'cause I think the, I, we could probably talk about this for forever, but we, I'm gonna get to the, our last questions.
But you know, for myself, you know, there's a, even there's a culling, right? As you graduate from Marathon to Ironman, iron Man to Super Ironman, where the population gets diminishingly smaller. Right. And the, my, I guess my core question would be like, can Eve Frontier if it's that, if you are the, if, if the parallel is the top, you know, 500 people who decide that Ironman isn't enough for them and they need to run Super Ironman, um, you know, how can you make sure that there's enough people in that world to make sure it's populous enough that it's like the game doesn't die?
You know, many games die. They have 3000 CCU and they die on the vine. That sort of, I think we could probably talk that out for a while.
Hilmar: Yeah, so I have actually never run. Marathon, but I've done half an Ironman twice. And when I did it in its time, oh my God, the cities they took place in were like packed with people.
When I went and did, there was a party of people coming with us, and I don't know how much I paid to the ENT entry, organ entropy for the organization of Ironman. And, and that whole ecosystem is massive. Like it's massive and it continues to grow to a point where it's somewhat problematic. Like the, the places where they run these tournaments are packed.
Like there isn't enough play space in the world to run all these Ironman con contests, uh, to meet the, the, the demand for Ironman. And they're still kind of, kind of early in their marathon. So, like, don't knock that out. I, the, the, the calling doesn't necessarily work how you think it works. Like, there are 8 billion people you're calling from, from, you're not calling from one cohort over to another.
So, I'm just not really a big believer that we are subdividing. I, I think we're doing something different. Rome will be, Rome New York will be New York, and people pick their city based on kind of what they, what they like, or they might even switch.
Alexandra: Do a bit of both.
Hilmar: Yeah, do a bit of both. And I was thinking, which would you summar in like, uh, probably wrong.
Yeah, I don't know. I, I, I would only expect, well, I mean, I've been in New York in all seasons. It kind of have a vibe in all seasons.
Alexandra: It does, it, it does have a vibe. As someone who lives in New York, it has a vibe in all seasons, of course. But, okay. Yeah, I'm sure that we could talk this out forever.
I love this analogy. One quick question before we move on to some final questions about the gaming industry. How many, in terms of team, right, like you launch Eve with 30 people, how big is CCP today and who is working on Eve Online and who is working on Eve Frontier? If you just had to split the team?
Hilmar: So, everybody's working on both. Yeah. CCP overall is 400 people. So I mean, the dev team on Eve Online is about a hundred people. We have like a core development team, which is like 20 or 30. We have customer report publishing. We split their time a little bit. It tends to be more on the publishing side, but we keep the teams very separate.
So, the core Frontier team is 50 people, so kind of half the team. A little bit bigger than the initial Eve development team, but we wanted to keep it pretty lean. It's when you're discovering a new thing, it is, is not something you scale out the gate. I mean, Eve Online can have a hundred developers work on the game.
I mean, there's a lot of process. There's a lot of like organic understanding of what Team Line is and what the needs. And we have a lot of engagement with the community such as the CSM and our various ways to kind of source where we need to focus on any, so we can have more developers on Eve. Yeah, we have 50 people.
The core development team probably works more on Frontier right now because it's, it's a way to push our core technology, which we then can back port into Eve, for example, Eve still runs on Python 2.7 or like a, it's called the Stockless version of Python. It's a very special version of Python, but we, for Eve Frontier, we beat the bullet, then upgrade it to Python 3.12, I think we're on right now.
So, we've done these kind of things which are hard to do in the life environment of Eve. We've kind of spiked with Frontier, proven in doubt. Think we'll back port it, which you can almost kind of thank in my New York, Rome analog for sure. I mean, it didn't put like skyscrapers on the Colosseum, but now that New York exists, all series of the world take inspiration from the fact that it does exist and you think differently about what the CT is because of you have both to pull it ideas from.
So, yeah, that's the rough split. Then here where I am in London, we have about 17 people working on Azure, which we are kind of creating a very innovative thing. It's called T one Cars. Were actually merging and Ivan into one kind of platform using the, the play base of Eve Online. It's basically a game that takes place on a planet, on Eve Online.
So, it's another way to kind of break apart them a little bit of what the game can be. Now we have kind of two games sharing an environment in with, Eve Online and Banker, sharing and economy. So, I mean, we're doing all sorts of crazy things.
Alexandra: Got it. Okay. Very cool. Alright, so we're gonna close with some questions about the gaming industry.
Probably about two just given that we're short on time. But my first question is, you know, you guys have done this tremendous job of retaining this insane community for like over two decades at this point. And there's this, in the past five to 10 years or so there's been a new development and nascent community building philosophy, right?
Building public. Build alongside your community. What do you think today's modern day developers should learn from Eve's social design and how does that impact the, the way they should do development today, which might be different than they had done AAA or AA in the past 20 years?
Hilmar: Well, I mean, Eve Online was always kind of built in public. The out the gate we were, I mean, uh, so we have like an alpha test of Eve Online in like 2001. We've been doing it for one year and immediate years. We saw that, like the alpha test feedback actually, we, we just had people in Iceland in the Alpha test and they just came to our office to give feedback.
It was a very hindsight smashed way to do it. Even if, well, I mean, it was kind of out of necessity. The then it wasn't like super proliferated it. And then we did a fairly long kind of beta test. We run a beta test from like January 2003 till May when it comes out. That was a long beta test back then.
And then, I mean, the game has kind of been built in the open in a kind of an extreme sports way ever since. So, I think in many ways the world has kind of been adopting our playbook more than anything else. For sure. We learned many different things from industry overall, but it feels like people are more or less sort of catching up to that way of building things.
And I guess now with the extreme opinionated, feedback driven nature of the internet, any game is kind of built in the open, whether they like it or not. Like the, you even see. I mean, one of my favorite games in recent times is Alden Ring. And when you play Alden Ring, it is like, okay, this game is obviously designed for the construct where the internet exists, because some of the obscurity in this game can only be explained by some people going like, way deeper than I will ever have time for.
I will not get all the references from all the inspiration that, from software has taken to make this game happen. But man, do I appreciate people to lay all that lure in some YouTube videos on and all that is obscure things you can do when kind of, I mean, sometimes when I'm playing a game, like following all these crest lines, they're so obscure and kind of hard to follow, which I kind of like, I mean, I kind of like the fact that it has, it doesn't have an instructor, me, and it doesn't have like interest question marks on the map, whatever. But sometimes I dabble in just Okay, cuts me up here. What's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean that's, that's an example of nobody would make a game like that unless the internet existed. Like you have to make the game so enigmatic so that a group of people can figure out the game together and with their mechanic of like hits and all that.
And the fact it's all on YouTube and Reddit and whatever is kind of like a construct of you'll need to make the game harder. Yeah. But the internet exists, so I think everyone is kind of building in the open. And so, so whether you acknowledge it or not, you are.
Alexandra: Yeah. Okay. All right. And then last question is, if you had to summarize the current state of the gaming industry in one or two sentence, what one or two sentences, how would you do that?
And what is the biggest change the game industry is about to face that game developers need to be ready for, but they are not?
Hilmar: So, I, I think there are two vector going on in gaming right now. There are games which are highly tve, like Eve Online, but obviously the bigger ones are Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite.
They have coined the Black hole games, but I would call Eve Online the OT Black Hole Game.
The others are bigger. I can them that, these young upstarts. But, uh, so that's one. Then we have a discovery problem in games, like there are hundreds of thousands of mobile games, uh, released every year, last year, 18,000 games were released on Steam. I think the 30 years there's a hundred dollars listing fee on Steam, and I think it's only a few hundred games out of those 18,000 games that made back the listing fee.
So well done, Valve, and having a listing fee and and, but the discovery is broken. Like, neither mobile platforms nor Steam are built for this scenario, or tens of thousands of games are being released every year. Some of it is various type of, I'm gonna go out on a limb and call it slop. Obviously not all 18,000 games, but some ratio of them where human created slop.
We are now entering an era where human created, AI assisted manufacturing on game will games will reach some epic proportion and that will make the discovery problem even more challenging. So, and I think the discovery problem is maybe a meta concept of fighting for attention. So, I think our attentions as humans living on planet Earth in 2025, there are high demands on our attention.
We can all relate. I mean, it's the new cycle. It's all the social media, it's all the amazing games in my Steam library. I will never have time to play. It's, it's my own life. It's my family, it's my job. It's, it's a lot. So, I think we are just in a, a very, very challenging time of cutting through when it comes to attention and discovery, and it ain't getting easier.
So, I think games are affected by this, but so is all form of media. So, we feel it now both on, uh, frankly, on all our games. What used to be a playbook for getting people's attention to join something new is out the window. Like, we're, we're off the map. You need to reinvent everything.
Alexandra: Really interesting. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with everything you said., And it's a really hard problem to find a solution to, given the state of distribution, given its consolidation around a fair two, two stores on the PC market, two stores in the mobile market, two consoles. And it's, it's a really big challenge.
And I think you're, I think you're, I think I agree. There's just an oversaturation of games and, you know, in an oversaturated world, how do you make sure that your thing gets, this is the thing that gets seen and it's not easy. But anyway, we are well over time. Hilmar, this was so enjoyable. I bet I could probably go back and forth with you for, for hours more.
I think what you guys are doing with Eve Frontier and the blockchain and it's so interesting and thank you so much for coming on and talking with me about the history of CCP and what you guys, where you guys are going next. It was such a pleasure.
Hilmar: Yes. Very enjoyed to talk a lot.
Alexandra: Awesome. Okay, well as always friends, that's the top of our episode. If you have feedback or ideas, please hit me up at [email protected]. I'm always open. And with that, we're out. I will see you next time. Thank you.
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