EVE Online developer CCP Games is planning on making its Carbon development platform open source sometime later this year, which will grant interested developers access to the Carbon engine that powers the sci-fi MMO, all with an eye on “[opening] up game development to everyone” according to CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson.
This move might naturally elicit the question of why, which Petursson was all too willing to answer in an interview, and that answer effectively boils down to securing the legacy of CCP Games. “We want EVE Online to go on forever,” he says. “Open sourcing the platform that powers it in my view is greatly increasing the odds of that happening.”
As for what he expects out of developers once the tech goes open source, he basically gives a happy shrug of the shoulders. “If there’s anything I’ve learned from all this is that you shouldn’t curb the emergent potential by having too specific an idea of what is going to happen,” he answers. “Every time you try to put a lid on it, you curb the potential. Make it open, and the sky is the limit.”
The dev platform will also feature blockchain tools when it goes open source, which Petursson points out are wholly optional pieces. He also appears to finally have read the room regarding how the tech is “a weird database,” but he still defends blockchain in at least a tangential sense:
“I believe you can use this database to build something unique, but I’m not here to bless the technology, per se. Tech is just tech. You can use whatever tech to good and bad means.”
This of course doesn’t mean that EVE’s own blockchain game is going away, but it at least would suggest that Petursson might finally be reckoning with reality.
