We're back from Eve Fanfest in Iceland, bringing with us two features on the future of the newly rebranded Fenris Creations and its growing portfolio.

First, we speak to CEO Hilmar Pétursson on regaining independence after selling to Pearl Abyss in 2018, why forthcoming titles Frontier and Vanguard are helping complete the vision first formed in Eve Online, and how partnering with Google DeepMind could better humanity's future.

Next, Fenris VP of publishing Eyrún Jónsdóttir and COO Adrian Blunt outline the importance of Fanfest, why controller support is critical to the company's new games, and how Eve Online provides the luxury of being able to plan far into the future.

To conclude: industry takes in Social Commentary, further reading in Extra, and a dip into the latest edition of Edge. Enjoy!

Hilmar Pétursson just bought his studio back for roughly half its sale price in 2018. When Pearl Abyss acquired CCP Games, the deal was valued at $225 million. Earlier this month, the studio regained independent control for $120 million, comprising $100 million in cash and $20 million in token acquisition rights tied to forthcoming blockchain title Eve Frontier. Talking to us at Fanfest in Reykjavik, the CEO is relaxed about the arithmetic.

"I mean, we just live in a different world than in 2018," he says. "It's tough [at the moment], and that expresses in company valuations… The valuation of gaming companies is different than in 2018.

"It's more a story about our industry, I think, rather than about this particular transaction."

The split, he insists, was genuinely cordial. Both companies had been moving in different directions. Pearl Abyss was focused on Crimson Desert's development (Pétursson is effusive about the game, noting he has "put 200 hours into it") while Fenris had its own evolving roadmap. Talks about collaborating on projects, including potential use of Pearl Abyss's Black Desert engine, never solidified.

"We just never really got around to it," Pétursson says. "And then we thought, 'OK, are we really achieving that we were thinking about? Will we ever? Isn't it better to part ways?'" He describes the closing process as a digital high-five: "Everyone was very happy."

In practical terms, little has changed. Fenris Creations' ownership structure is majority Icelandic. Alongside senior management, the investor base includes private Icelandic individuals and national pension funds. Pétursson has been a long-standing advocate for redirecting Icelandic pension capital towards domestic innovation. The funds, among the largest per capita in the world, currently send around 40 per cent of their allocation to Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange.

"I've often said, 'OK, maybe we take one per cent and invest in innovation in Iceland,'" he laughs. The logic for pension funds, he argues, is that Fenris, with almost 30 years of history and stable cash flow, looks less like a tech startup and more like infrastructure.

"We almost look like a utility. For a pension fund, it's almost like investing in a power company in Iceland."

Planetary warfare

With the company's independent future assured, the more immediately consequential question for the industry, and for the Eve Online faithful at this year's Fanfest, is what Fenris does next with New Eden, the universe of the game. The answer is that Fenris plans to run three live-service games simultaneously: Eve Online, extraction shooter Vanguard, and deep-space survival horror title Frontier.

Pétursson has been talking about putting "boots on the ground" in New Eden for years. Whether Vanguard succeeds in the high-risk-high-reward extraction-shooter market, a genre that has claimed numerous well-funded casualties, is, by his own admission, not something he worries about in the conventional way.

"Whether it's difficult, hard, a gamble, risky, I don't really care. We're doing it. It's fucking hard, but I'm not going to cry about it. This is the world we have chosen, and we will persevere and win."

Vanguard's alpha will run via Steam from July 7–20 this year, and Pétursson points to internal metrics suggesting that players familiar with the Eve IP will engage with Vanguard at levels that would, in his words, produce "the hottest-shit shooter ever made." The challenge is closing the gap with players who have no prior relationship with New Eden. That divide, and how much progress the summer alpha succeeds in reducing it, is how he's defining success for this phase.

Frontier is a longer, more structural bet. The game is built around an open, blockchain-mediated economy. The studio has spent decades managing real-money trading and black-market currency exchange within Eve Online.

"Eve Online is a closed economy, kind of like Iceland was in the '80s under currency controls," Pétursson jokes. "But the economy has been opened, and that's been a rather good thing for Iceland, which now has almost the highest GDP per capita in the world."

The game is also designed as an open platform and is literally open source. Frontier's architecture lets third parties add features without the studio's permission. A recent hackathon attracted 800 participants and 128 submitted projects, a scale Pétursson describes as exceeding "all our wildest expectations." The Frontier development budget is separately financed, which means, he emphasises, that it is not cannibalising Eve Online's operating revenue: "That isolates it as a business risk."

Finally, the long public roadmap announced for Eve Online at Fanfest, anchored by the release of the Cradle Of War expansion next month, is itself a signal worth noting. Pétursson frames it as evidence that the studio's endless internal refinement of technology and teams has reached a point where long-horizon planning is emerging naturally.

For the future of humanity

The third major development announced in Reykjavik, and in some respects the one with the widest implications, is a research partnership with Google DeepMind. Pétursson has known DeepMind founder and Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis for a decade. The partnership is not primarily a product integration, but rather a research programme using an offline version of Eve Online as a test bed before anything AI-related gets pulled into the live game.

"We have to figure out the boundaries, and the AI needs to know the basics," Pétursson says. "Just like having humans know the basics of Eve Online – it takes a while."

Pétursson also expects to see papers published as a result of the collaboration. The intellectual basis of the partnership rests on a shared belief that games are learning environments.

"Playing and learning are extremely related," he notes. "We hear constant stories of people who come and describe to me in elaborate detail how Eve has taught them the truth about themselves and made them the best version of themselves."

The endpoint of the DeepMind partnership is, of course, typically ambitious.

"I think we'll find something epic that will really make life for all of us better in the long run," Pétursson concludes. DeepMind, he says, is "in awe" of Eve as an AI research base: "That brings an extremely inspiring twist to the partnership, how eager and frankly giddy they are. They frame it as like an honour to get to work with Eve players and Fenris Creations on finding some cool shit that will benefit mankind."

While the main news from this years Fanfest saw the transformation of CCP into Fenris Creations, professional life for VP of publishing Eyrún Jónsdóttir and COO Adrian Blunt continues unaltered. They spoke to Knowledge in Iceland about how the studio is scaling operations to accomodate Vanguard and Frontier alongside Eve, and why Fanfest is still the most important date in the company's calendar.

Despite the corporate news surrounding Fenris's identity, Eve players attending Fanfest were understandably more focused on revelations related to the company's forthcoming release slate: the launch of Eve expansion Cradle Of War on June 9; extraction shooter Eve Vanguard's alpha from July 7–20; and survival sandbox Eve Frontier's new cycle, its sixth, on June 25.

Running three live-service games simultaneously is an operational challenge Fenris Creations tackles via the singularity of New Eden, the setting for all its games.

"We generally share infrastructure," says Blunt. "Even when it was just Eve, that's one universe, with so many different touch points just within Eve Online. From a support structure, we've always had to support different teams within that. Moving out to multiple games is really just an extension of that."

Despite the manner in which Fenris has traditionally dealt with multiple projects, the approach has evolved as Vanguard and Frontier have matured into larger entities with their own communities and release cadences.

"As the titles were growing more into becoming their own thing, we now have more dedicated people for those specific titles," Jónsdóttir adds. "We have a mini team in London doing Vanguard stuff, and we're establishing a more specific team for Frontier on the publishing side as well. There are limits to how many people can work across different titles. As they grow, they need more dedicated resources."

For Blunt, the operational discipline that makes this manageable came from the same place as the games themselves. The stability offered by Eve Online, which achieved record numbers towards the end of last year, has allowed for measured strategising: "We've had the luxury of time to get used to doing this and to scale up in a very methodical way,' he says.

Commercial logic

The commercial logic of the shared-universe model becomes clearest at FanFest. The annual gathering in Reykjavik is primarily a player event, but it's also a publishing vehicle for the growing Fenris portfolio.

"Even though the fundamental is Eve players coming to hear updates, meet other players and meet the devs," Jónsdóttir says, "we're able to use the opportunity and bring showcases for Vanguard and Frontier into the festival. Every year, we're starting to see more and more players specific to those games showing up."

Blunt, whose career spans Splash Damage, Square Enix, EA and Ubisoft, is unambiguous about FanFest's significance.

"I've never experienced anything like this," he says. "We have a relationship with our playerbase and our community that is, I would argue, unrivalled in the industry."

The studio takes a player-centric approach that runs through every function. Blunt notes, for example, that FanFest is "the highlight of [the] finance team's year, because they finally get to meet the players." He recounts an anecdote of meeting a player at Fanfest who created an Eve account after attending the event: "That's his driving force for playing in the game. It's an engagement tool for us all to be able to talk about this incredible universe that we've created, that the players have created."

A multi-platform universe

But Fanfest is no longer only an Eve Online event. One of the firmer indications about where the portfolio is heading came not from the event's main stage but from the exhibition floor, where Eve Frontier was being demoed with game controllers. For a studio whose flagship title has spent 23 years accumulating one of the most complex keyboard-and-mouse interfaces in PC gaming, the implications are significant.

"It's so much easier to start with controller support in mind than having to do it later down the line," Jónsdóttir says.

The executives remain coy on the subject of console versions, but the ambition is obvious. Blunt explicitly references controller support for Vanguard.

"Whilst right now everything is on PC, I think it is very important that we support controller, because that just keeps doors open," he says. "Again, surfacing the games wherever we can. It would be foolish to ignore console, but certainly to ignore gamepad support, particularly for a shooter.

"We're investing heavily in that and we'll continue to do so."

When exactly these titles might arrive on formats other than PC is, Jónsdóttir acknowledges, "another question."

But while experimentation with new products and formats is ongoing, so is the stability of Eve Online. The announcement of Cradle Of War, the first instalment of a three-expansion arc called Theatres Of War, signals a maturation of the company as much as the product itself. Blunt's read is practical and matches similar comments from CEO Hilmar Pétursson: the roadmap represents what is now possible, not a change in direction.

"I come from a development and production background," he says. "I always want to see as far into the future as I possibly can. But I'm also very cognisant that the next six months are probably pretty clear – beyond that, it's a bit vague. There's always going to be change within that theme, and we have to be prepared for that."

The studios across Reykjavik, London and Shanghai are all surfacing individual efforts towards a singular goal. "That's one of the beauties of Fenris: we're all working in this universe," Blunt says. "It's all working in that singular vision."

For Jónsdóttir, the purpose of a public multi-expansion commitment is more direct.

"It's first and foremost for our playerbase to have insight into the future," she says. "It gives players something to look forward to. And in the meantime, they have a lot of things to do in the current expansion. That keeps them happy and playing."

SOCIAL COMMENTARY

"We built this thing under the assumption that it would solve a lot of problems, and now we really need someone to solve a problem with it or we're going to look super-stupid."

'This thing' is generative AI, and by 'we', Dr Mike Cook, AI researcher at London's King's College, means the technology industry as a whole. What does the rise of machine-authored content mean for the future of videogame production? What might be the benefits of so-called 'synthetic creativity'? And how do we square such developments with ethical considerations?

Edge 424, out now, is a special edition centred on artificial intelligence throughout the world of games in 2026. Alongside our cover story, AI also features as a key theme among several new and forthcoming releases discussed this month, such as Prove You're Human, D-topia, Saros, Pragmata and Replaced, while designer Jordan Thomas (BioShock 2, The Magic Circle) shares his views on gen-AI in our new Profile slot.

Elsewhere, we tell the story behind the creation of Mewgenics, talk to Jenova Chen about games as art on the occasion of Thatgamecompany's 20th anniversary, and revisit GTA: Vice City in Time Extend. This month's Hype lineup features forthcoming releases such as Orbitals, Blighted and All Will Rise, while games including Mixtape, Vampire Crawlers and Tides Of Tomorrow arrive for review.

In the magazine's iteration of Knowledge, we consider why so many videogames worship at the altar of Warhammer, and also talk to some of the people driving Scotland's new wave of game production. Finally, on a lighter note, Steven Poole takes a look at Eva Illouz's Emotional Technologies: How Techno-Capitalism Exploits Our Subjectivity.

Edge 424 is available to buy here, and right now you can also subscribe to the magazine for just £/$5 for your first three issues.

We'll be back next week. In the meantime, don't forget to share your feedback with us by email ([email protected]), and follow us via Bluesky and LinkedIn.