EVE Online studio CCP Games goes independent, rebrands and brings in Google
What's the deal? CCP Games, the Icelandic studio behind EVE Online, has completed a management buyout from South Korean parent company Pearl Abyss for $120M, rebranding as Fenris Creations and returning to independent ownership for the first time since 2018.
The new ownership group comprises senior management and long-term investors. Birgir Már RagnarssonDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, co-founder and partner at Omega VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, has been appointed chairman of the board.
Simultaneously, Google has taken a minority stake in the company as part of a research partnership with Google DeepMind focused on AI development inside EVE Online's universe. No financial terms for Google's investment were disclosed.
Why now? Fenris Creations enters independence from a position of commercial strength. EVE Online — a single-universe spaceship MMO launched in May 2003 — generated more than $70M in revenue in 2025, recording its highest-revenue month ever in November and its second-highest revenue quarter in the game's history in Q4 2025.
The company remains profitable and has two titles in development: EVE Vanguard, an extraction-adventure first-person shooter, and EVE Frontier, a space survival game.
Pearl Abyss acquired CCP Games in 2018 for $425M. After a joint strategic review, both parties concluded that Fenris Creations is better served under independent ownership focused exclusively on the EVE universe, while Pearl Abyss refocuses on its own titles. The split is described as mutual and amicable.
Google DeepMind's research involvement reflects a specific opportunity. EVE Online is one of the most complex persistent virtual environments ever built — a single shared universe with a player-driven economy, emergent political structures, and millions of interconnected decisions accumulated over two decades.
DeepMind will use an offline version of the game running on a local server to test and evaluate AI models in areas including long-horizon planning, memory, and continual learning. DeepMind co-founder and chief executive Demis HassabisDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, who began his career designing AI simulation games, said he has long admired the studio's work.
What could go wrong? Management buyouts can constrain a studio's ability to invest aggressively in new titles or technology. With two games in active development alongside the live service demands of EVE Online — now in its third decade — Fenris Creations is carrying a significant operational load. If either new title underperforms, the pressure on EVE Online as the company's primary revenue engine will intensify.
The Google DeepMind partnership is research-focused rather than commercial — it does not guarantee a product or revenue stream, and the practical benefits for Fenris Creations beyond Google's minority investment and the reputational signal remain to be defined.
The signal: The deal is notable on two levels. First, it is a rare example of a profitable, long-running game studio returning to independence at a moment when most gaming M&A runs in the opposite direction. Second, it represents Google's most direct investment in a game studio to date in service of AI research — a signal that frontier AI labs are increasingly looking to complex game environments, rather than purely synthetic benchmarks, as the testing ground for their most ambitious work.
EVE Online's single-shard universe — where every player exists in the same persistent world — is arguably the most complex human-AI interaction environment available to researchers outside of the real world itself.
Sources:
Fenris Creations
EVE Online
Bloomberg
PC Gamer
GamesBeat
Pocket Gamer
Google DeepMind, X
Image credit:
Fenris Creations
J.V.
