EVE Online is losing a key dev today as Senior Community Development Lead Sveinn “CCP Guard” Kjarval announced his departure from CCP Games.
“After sixteen amazing years at CCP I recently got a new opportunity. After a lot of thinking, I decided to jump on it and will be starting a completely different adventure – in a completely different industry – in a few weeks time,” he writes. “My best way to explain it is that I simply got this crazy idea in my head – that I should get up from the place where I‘m happy, appreciated (most of the time heh 199) and safe, to do something completely different where I don‘t know all the answers and can only rely on myself and the skills I’ve picked up along the way.”
He also says that he’s not leaving because of any specific thing going on in the company and that contrary to what you might think, this isn’t a hard time for CCP.
“As hard as it is to make the decision to drop fleet (which I’ve not fully digested by the way), leaving on a high note feels like the way to do it. CCP is in great shape and in great hands! Pearl Abyss is the best thing to happen to CCP, they‘re smart, patient and they have real respect for our work with the EVE community through the years. I‘m confident you‘ll all come to see what I already know from being on the inside through all of this. The Community Team is growing (even factoring in my departure), our marketing teams and dev teams are full of energy with smart new hires all over, exciting plans and heads full of great ideas for the future of EVE.”
EVE fans will recall that CCP Games lost several prominent developers in 2018 prior to the buyout of the company by Pearl Abyss, most notably Andie “CCP Seagull” Nordgren, the game’s popular executive producer. The year before that, the community team was nearly wiped out in a round of severe layoffs.
Reddit is suitably dismayed, given the prevailing belief that Guard was the key face of the company and had worked there since 2002.
o7
