Following the sale of CCP Games from Pearl Abyss for $120 million in cash and non-cash elements, the Icelandic studio known mainly for the MMORPG EVE Online announced that it is rebranding and will be called Fenris Creations henceforth. The split was the result of a joint strategic review between the two parties, who mutually concluded that independent ownership was the better fit, citing "broader differences in operating context, current strategic focus, and long-term priorities".
The new ownership group comprises Fenris Creations' senior management and long-term investors, including Omega Ventures co-founder Birgir Már Ragnarsson, who takes over as Board Chairman. CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson confirmed there will be no layoffs, office closures, or restructuring as part of the transition; he also underlined that EVE Online delivered record revenue in November 2025, its second-highest revenue quarter in history in Q4, and closed the year with over $70 million in reported revenue, some of its best financial results in years.
Alongside the independence announcement, today Fenris Creations revealed a new research partnership with Google DeepMind, with Google also taking a minority equity stake in the company. The research focus covers:
- Long-horizon planning
- Memory and continual learning
- Intelligence in complex, dynamic, player-driven systems
DeepMind will work with an offline version of EVE Online running on a local server to test and evaluate AI models in a controlled setting, and the partnership will also explore new gameplay experiences enabled by these technologies. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis explicitly tied his interest to his own gaming background and to the lab's history of game-based AI research (Atari DQN, AlphaGo, AlphaStar, SIMA), calling EVE Online "amazingly complex" as a research environment.
As a reminder, CCP Games (now Fenris Creations) is currently developing the extraction shooter game EVE Vanguard, which is connected to EVE Online, and the survival spin-off EVE Frontier, in addition to maintaining the long-running EVE Online.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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