CCP Games, the Icelandic studio behind EVE Online, is no more. The company announced today that it has rebranded as Fenris Creations following a $120 million management buyout from Pearl Abyss, ending a relationship between the two companies that began with Pearl Abyss’s $225 million acquisition back in 2018. Pearl Abyss disclosed the transaction value through regulatory filings, with the consideration including both cash and non-cash elements.
The rebrand is essentially a return to independence. Fenris Creations is now governed by its own Board of Directors, with the ownership group made up of senior management and long-term investors. The company stressed that nothing changes operationally, with the same leadership team, studios, and ongoing development plans staying in place. Headquarters will remain in Reykjavík, with the existing studios in Reykjavík, London, and Shanghai continuing to operate as they do today. There are also no layoffs or restructuring tied to the transition, which is worth noting given how often acquisitions and divestitures lead to staff cuts these days.
The bigger story tucked into the announcement is the new research partnership with Google DeepMind. The collaboration will use EVE Online as a research environment to study long-horizon planning, memory, and continual learning in AI systems, with DeepMind working with an offline version of the game running on a local server. Google has also taken a minority stake in Fenris Creations as part of the transition. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, called EVE Online a “player-driven universe as amazingly complex” as he’s seen, and the press release floats potential new gameplay experiences enabled by the partnership without going into specifics. CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson framed the broader transition as giving the company “direct ownership, clear accountability, and the independence to invest in worlds that grow over decades.”
EVE Online itself is in good shape going into the change. Fenris Creations reported that EVE Online closed 2025 with some of its best results in years, including a record-breaking November and a Q4 that ranked as the second-highest revenue quarter in the game’s 20-plus year history. The company brought in over $70 million in revenue across 2025 and remains profitable, with two upcoming titles also in development: EVE Vanguard, an extraction-adventure FPS, and EVE Frontier, an online space survival game. Both are set in the EVE universe and will continue under the Fenris Creations banner.
It’s a notable moment for one of the longest-running MMOs in the industry, and the new arrangement gives the team a lot more direct control over the EVE universe than it had under Pearl Abyss. Whether the DeepMind partnership turns into something tangible for players or remains a pure research collaboration is the more interesting question, especially given how cautious players tend to be about AI-assisted gameplay in long-running live service titles.
