EVE Online – Hilmar Veigar Pétursson Interview

Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, the CEO of CCP Games who’s been with the company for over two decades now, recently had a fairly extensive chat with VentureBeat that focused on CCP’s long-running MMO EVE Online, its history, and its unique approach to creating a persistent online world people would want to live in.

Here’s a couple of sample questions:

GamesBeat: In Eve’s defense, I looked back at the book Empires of Eve, and there aren’t many games out there where the wars that happen inside them are memorialized inside a book, because they became such an important part of people’s lives.

Pétursson: I know. I don’t think there’s any game that has two history books about what happened inside it, books that were written by the players themselves. Eve needs no defense, in a way. It stands on its own. It’s a monumental piece of human achievement, from both the company and from the players who created the majority of the interesting things in it. It just should have a higher ability to embrace all the other millions of people who want to take part in that, without having to feel like they’re a 6-year-old in an MBA class.

GamesBeat: Judging by the popularity of the conference we just threw, it feels like a lot of people want this now. They don’t know they want Eve Online, but they want this experience.

Pétursson: Right. They want to have purpose. They want to have friends. They want to have social goals to achieve together. They want to do something that matters, that leaves a mark, that has persistence, that goes down in eternity. Eve Online has all these things. Maybe we were just ahead of our time. Maybe the world is slowly catching up to Eve Online, us included. A lot of it was intuition and timing, and not fully thought through.