CCP Games discusses EVE Online as a forever game, its 300K players, and its mobile and big screen aspirations

Variety has a fresh interview with CCP Games CEO Hilmar Petursson on the sale of the company – and its chief asset, MMORPG EVE Online – to Black Desert company Pearl Abyss. The sale took the genre by surprise last week but probably shouldn’t have, given the studio’s financial moves over the last couple of years, which included the sale of some of its subcompanies and distinct shift away from VR in 2017, which Petursson said was the right move, given his belief “that the [VR] market didn’t bear more investment” and didn’t seem likely to “change in the coming few years.”

But CCP just can’t seem to stop looking at what’s coming next and trying to get there first. It looks like mobile is the company’s next venture, now with Pearl Abyss buoying it in international waters.

“We didn’t initially feel that the mobile industry was quite there, but we’ve been keeping an eye on mobile trends in Korea and we’ve noticed that it has stepped up in terms of hardcoreness. […] We see that trend coming West in the next three to five years. We made this decision to move into mobile game development due to those trends and the overall increase in the power of the handset and the maturing of the market. You can basically look at what’s going on in Korea and that will be a reality in the West in the coming five or so years.”

There are a few other bits of interest in the piece, including the fact that EVE Online apparently has “about 300,000 monthly active users” and is probably looking at “a major overhaul of the game’s underlying systems” to ensure that it can “live up to the aspiration of having a game that goes on forever” – thanks to Pearl Abyss.

And intriguingly, living forever might not just be in game form: Petursson is hinting at bringing the franchise to the big screen since the corporation has “enough power now to get something done.”

Don’t miss our own EVE columnist’s take on the sale!